Wilda C. Gafney

From 2012 to 2013, Gafney wrote a series of articles for the Huffington Post on topics including sexual violence and civil rights. In June 2018, in response to Jeff Sessions quoting Romans 13 to defend President Donald Trump's policy of separating children from their parents at the border, Gafney wrote an article for Religion Dispatches titled "If We Did Use the Bible to Run the Country…." In September 2020, Gafney participated in "Scholar Strike", an initiative inspired by the strikes by athletes to call attention to racial injustice in the US. Gafney posted a video to the Scholar Strike YouTube page titled "White Supremacy in Biblical Interpretation." After many journalists called January 6, 2021, a "dark day", Gafney responded, "Today was not a 'dark day'. Today was a white day. One of the whitest days in American history."

In 2019, the Union of Black Episcopalians presented Gafney with the Anna Julia Haywood Cooper Honor Award for her scholarship and advocacy on matters of race and gender. In 2020, the Society of Biblical Literature named her one of the first two recipients of its Outstanding Mentor Award.

Gafney's first teaching position was at the Lutheran Seminaries in Philadelphia and Gettysburg, beginning in 2003. In 2014, she was appointed Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. In 2018, she served on a committee that recommended The Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church in the United States be changed to gender neutral language.

Gafney earned a BA from Earlham College, a Quaker institution, in 1987, where she was one of only seven Black students on a campus of over 1000 students. She completed a Master's of Divinity from Howard University, an historically black college, in 1997. She completed a PhD in Hebrew Bible from Duke University in 2006, where she was mentored by Roland E. Murphy. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, Daughters of Miriam, a study of female prophets in ancient Israel.

Wilda C. Gafney, also known as Wil Gafney, (born 1966) is an American biblical scholar and Episcopal priest who is the Right Rev. Sam B. Hulsey Professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. She is specialist in womanist biblical interpretation, and topics including gender and race.