Profile
For more than a decade, April Christina Curley (she/her/hers) has built her career centering poor, Black and Brown people, striving to make an impact on the very communities that she, herself, comes from. Most recently, she spent 6 years as a Diversity Program Manager at Google working to expand access to opportunities in tech for undergraduate Black and brown students, including those who identify as coming from low-income communities, students with disabilities, and students who exist along the queer spectrum. She helped create and grow a program called Google in Residence, designed to improve tech-sector diversity by placing engineers at Historically Black Colleges and Universities to teach and mentor students. Highlights of April’s tenure at Google include single-handedly increasing Google’s Black technical hiring from 0 hires in 2014 to 500+ through her program Google In Residence, managing Google’s second ever Queer Tech Voices Conference featuring high-profile speakers and artists, and spearheading the Google Student Newsletter as editor-in-chief engaging over 3,500 undergraduate students and faculty. Formerly, she was a diversity recruiter for Teach for America after serving for two years with the organization as a high school social studies teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools. She earned an M.A. in secondary education and teaching from Johns Hopkins University and is a member of Leadership for Educational Equity, a nonpartisan nonprofit that develops Teach for America alumni to become leaders in their communities. In her free time, April is working to make Baltimore City a safer space for queer people of color by creating Baltimore’s premiere queer sports league, Prism Sports.