Ashlee Yates Flanagan co-founded Prosser Project Publishing Collective with her partners, during 2016-2017 while in her 1st year as doctoral student in School Psychology at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. She serves as Co-founder, Partner, and Author to the collective. She was struck by the lack of Black and Brown faces in children’s literature, a resource often used in therapy and school settings to navigate discussions of feelings with children, and saw an opportunity to fill in the gap. She approached Trenesha Hill and Veronica Coriano with the idea, and they (without hesitation) were on board to figure out a way to contribute to the deficit. Together, they began to write stories, and on April 17, 2020 they legally registered their publishing company – Prosser Project, LLC. In the immediate Fall, they introduced their debut title, “Tamir & Naya Take on Anger.”
Ashlee professionally identifies as a child and adolescent psychologist (in training), a publisher, a researcher, and as a storyteller. Her academic career has aligned to support these identifications. She received her M.A. in Counseling from NYU, her M.S. and Ph.D. in School Psychology from Tulane University. Her research experience ranges from (1) analyzing social media use & concepts of “belonging” among Black youth to (2) exploring Black adolescent racial identity development to (3) historically analyzing traumatic early childhood memories of formerly enslaved African American women. Much of her research can be identified as qualitative methodology, a methodology that largely examines individuals’ words and lived experiences through interviews, focus groups, and visual data – in other words their stories. Thus, Dr. Yates Flanagan is invested in uplifting the stories of people of color through writing for Prosser Project and through publishing her research.
Education and Affiliations
2009 B.A. – Dillard University, New Orleans, LA
2012 M.A. – New York University, New York, NY
2022 Ph.D. – Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
2021-2022 – APPIC Pre-Doctoral Internship, University of Tennessee, College of Medicine, Psychology Consortium
2022 - Present - Postdoctoral Fellowship, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Center for Autism Research
Select Scholarly Works
Yates Flanagan, A., Rauf, R., White, A., Hodge, J., & Cunningham, M. (2022). The Intersection of Sense of Belonging and Social Media: A Qualitative Analysis Derived from the Voices of Black PWI Students. Manuscript under review for Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
Yates, A. K., Obus, E., Peele, H., Petrovic, L., Wing, S., & Cunningham, M. (2022). The function of power: A herstorical model of power, trauma, and policing African Americans. Psychological trauma: theory, research, practice, and policy.
Wing, S., Yates, A., Quinn, M., Heaven, K., & Lampkin, D. (2020). “To Be Intelligent, is to Have Ones’ Negro Blood Removed”: A Content Analysis of Contemporary Literature on Cognitive Ability, Intelligence and Black Students. Proposal under review for International Journal of Testing.
Cunningham, M., Mulser, R. M., Scott, K., & Yates, A. (2019). African American Adolescents Speak: The Meaning of Racial Identity in the Relation Between Individual Race-Related Stress and Depressive Symptoms. In Handbook of Children and Prejudice (pp. 533-550). Springer, Cham.
Yates, A., (2012). Revisiting technical review regarding dream interpretation. Journal of American Psychoanalysis, 72(2), 189-191.