Channing Joseph is a writer and a lecturer of Journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His academy project, “House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens — and Changed the World” (Crown and Picador, forthcoming), is a narrative biography of William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved African-American man who became the world’s first self-described “drag queen” and the leader of the earliest-known LGBTQ+ resistance group in the United States.