Dr. Joshua Baker is a licensed social worker, critical qualitative research psychologist, and teaching artist based in Birmingham, AL. He currently serves as the Community Engagement Director at The Knights & Orchids Society, Inc.—a Black Trans and queer led organization building the power of Black Trans and Queer folx across the South through a spectrum of wellness services. In March 2025, Baker earned his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Alabama where his research has explored the perceived social costs and consequences associated with Black Trans and queer identity including experiences of identity-related loss and grief, perceptions of belonging, and socio-cultural constructions of Blackness. Rooted in Black feminist foundations, Baker’s academic and artistic work is committed to the visibility, commemoration, and liberation of Black Trans and queer life—interrogating how confluent anti-Black and heterosexist systems dispossess Black Trans and queer communities. 

As a creative, Baker has had work published in Aura Literary Arts Review, Out Loud! HSV: A Year in Review (2016-2019), Hypertrophic Press, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, and Pigeonholes. In 2020, Baker was selected as the Editor’s Choice Winner for the Button Poetry Video Contest. Baker has also self-published four poetry chapbooks entitled This Here Side of Creation (2018) Love Poems & Other Ways to Lose a Poetry Slam (2018), Excerpts from the Wilderness (2022), and honey/and a handful/of blood (2024). 

As a teaching artist Baker believes in the invaluable role of storytelling in how we empower ourselves, empower each other, and reclaim our narratives. Baker has facilitated numerous workshops and presentations that merge research and art dedicated to Black queer liberation and futurity including work with Black Trans Futures, The Society of Personal and Social Psychology, Alabama Campaign for Adolescent Sexual Health, The Black Cherry Tree Project, No More Martyrs, The Flourish Alabama, Southeastern Universities Graduate Research Symposium, The Alabama Chapter of the Society of Sexual, Affectional, Intersex, and Gender Expansive Identities (ALSAIGE), Yellowhammer Fund, Human Rights Campaign HBCU Program, and The Sexploration Project. Baker has also been the recipient of the TRANSfutures Commission Grant, Emerging LGBTQ+ Leaders of Color (ELLC) Leadership Development Grant, McNair Graduate Fellowship, and the AAMU Social Work Behavioral Health Workforce Training Fellowship. 

Above all, Baker most highly prizes the privilege to pay forward the transformative role that Black queer visibility has played in his own liberation journey. Committed to a belief that “we are the living archive,” Baker’s body of work is a love letter to Black Trans and queer communities—an unabashed declaration that we are, have, and always will be here.