Walidah Imarisha
Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator, and spoken word artist. Author of the poetry book Scars/Stars (Drapetomedia Press), her nonfiction exploration of crime, prisons, and redemption will be published by AK Press and the IAS in 2016. She was also one of the editors of Another World Is Possible (Subway Press), the first 9/11 anthology. Her work has appeared in many publications, including Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop, Letters from Young Activists, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, The Quotable Rebel, Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, Joe Strummer: Punk Rock Warlord, and Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler. One of the cofounders and first editor of political hip-hop publication AWOL Magazine, Walidah also helped found the Human Rights Coalition, a Pennsylvania organization led by prisoners’ families and former prisoners. Walidah directed the 2005 Katrina documentary Finding Common Ground in New Orleans. She has taught in Portland State University’s Black Studies Department and Oregon State University’s Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department.
adrienne maree brown
adrienne maree brown is a writer, science fiction scholar, love and pleasure activist, facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit. In 2014 she was part of the inaugural Speculative Fiction Workshop at Voices of Our Nation. In 2013 she was awarded the Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship, and received a Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler–based science-fiction writing salons in Detroit (detroitscifigenerator.wordpress.com). Learning from her eighteen years of movement facilitation and participation, she approaches Butler’s work through the lens of emergent strategy: complexity born of simple interactions, aligned with nature, rooted in relationship, resilience, and embracing adaptability and change. adrienne has helped to launch a loose network that is growing Octavia Butler– and emergent strategy– related work with and for people interested in approaching speculative fiction from a social justice framework. adrienne centers emergent strategy in her facilitation work, and believes that changing how we create and strategize will change the way we exist. She is also on a teaching and healing path with Generative Somatics and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD). She documents her awe and learning at adriennemareebrown.net/blog.
Contributors
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, an Afro-Caribbean grandchild, a prayer-poet priestess, and a time-traveling space cadet who lives and loves in Durham, North Carolina. Alexis is the founder of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind local and intergalactic community school and a cofounder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, an experiential archive amplifying generations of queer black brilliance. Alexis was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton papers at Emory University while earning her PhD in English, African and African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. And her mother is a Trekkie.
Alixa Garcia
Alixa Garcia is cofounder and artistic director of Climbing PoeTree, an internationally renowned activist, multimedia theater, and spoken-word duo out of Brooklyn, New York. She has facilitated workshops and performed in hundreds of venues, from Harvard University to New York City jails on Rikers Island. Garcia has presented alongside such powerhouses as Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker. Her work has appeared in dozens of literary journals and magazines, including ArtForum and ColorLines. Her visual art has been featured on large-scale walls in New York City, Cuba, and Jamaica, as well as in galleries and museums, including the Smithsonian, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. She was the recipient of the Global Arts Fund/Astrea Visual Artist Grant, 2013–14, and won the best director award at the Reel Sistah Film Festival, New York City, 2008, for Unnatural Disasters and a Great Shift in Universal Consciousness. Through multiple artistic media, this multidisciplinary artist is on a mission to overcome destruction with creativity.
Autumn Brown
Autumn Brown is a mother, community organizer, theologian, artist, and facilitator. She is the Interim Executive Director of RECLAIM! and serves on the board of directors of the Common Fire Foundation. She has facilitated organizational and strategic development with community-based and movement organizations and trained hundreds of community organizers in consensus process, facilitation, and resisting racism. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she has also completed specialized study in theology at Oxford University and the General Theological Seminary of New York. She is a recipient of the 2009 Next Generation of Leadership Fellowship through the Center for Whole Communities and the 2010 Creative Community Leadership Institute Fellowship through Intermedia Arts. She currently lives in Avon, Minnesota, with her partner, children, dog, and wildlife.
Bao Phi
Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO’s Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His first collection of poems, Sông | Sing, was published by Coffee House Press in 2011 to critical acclaim. He has been a City Pages and Star Tribune artist of the year.
Dawolu Jabari Anderson
Dawolu Jabari Anderson lives and works in Houston. He studied fine arts at Texas Southern University and the University of Houston and completed residencies at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, and Skowhegan School of Paint and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Selected solo exhibitions include Dawolu Jabari Anderson: Black Film, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and The Birth of a Nation—Yo! Bumrush the Show: Works by Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Arts League Houston. Selected group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; System Error: Work is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, (2007), Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy; and Who Goliards? Artists at the Turn of the Century, (2004), University Museum, Texas Southern University.
Dani McClain
Dani McClain is a journalist living in Oakland, California. Her reporting and writing have been published in The Nation, ColorLines, Guernica, and Al Jazeera America.
David F. Walker
David F. Walker is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, educator, comic book writer, and author. His publication BadAzz MoFo became internationally known as the indispensable resource guide to black films of the seventies, and he is coauthor of the book Reflections on Blaxploitation: Actors and Directors Speak (Scarecrow, 2009). His other work includes the young adult series The Adventures of Darius Logan, as well as comic book series Number 13 (Dark Horse Comics) and The Army of Dr. Moreau (Monkeybrain Comics).
Gabriel Teodros
To know that another world is possible and to bring it to life through music: this has always been the mission of emcee Gabriel Teodros. He first made a mark in the Pacific Northwest with the group Abyssinian Creole and reached an international audience with his critically acclaimed solo debut Lovework. He has since set stages on fire across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as in Ethiopia. The year 2012 saw two more acclaimed albums: the solo release Colored People’s Time Machine and CopperWire’s Earthbound, a hip-hop space opera set in the year 2089 that Teodros recorded with fellow Ethiopian-American artists Meklit Hadero and Burntface. In 2014 Teodros released Children of the Dragon with Washington DC–based producer AirMe, followed by Evidence of Things Not Seen with New Zealand–based producer SoulChef. For more information, see www.gabrielteodros.com.
Kalamu ya Salaam
New Orleans–based writer, filmmaker, and educator Kalamu ya Salaam is a senior staff member of Students at the Center, a writing program in the New Orleans public schools. Kalamu is the moderator of neo•griot, an information blog for black writers and supporters of our literature worldwide. Kalamu can be reached at kalamu@mac.com.
Jelani Wilson
Jelani Wilson lives and writes in Jersey with his kick-ass family. If he’s not voraciously reading, watching cartoons, or practicing rapper hands, he’s off somewhere training in jiu jitsu or subverting authority. He promises to start posting his fiction along with mercifully brief musings and sociopolitical commentary at pageswithoutpaper.com, but on the real we’ll believe it when we see it.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer mixed Sri Lankan writer, performer, educator, and healer. The author of the Lambda Award-winning Love Cake and Consensual Genocide, she is also the coeditor, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. She is the cofounder of Mangos With Chili, and a lead artist with Sins Invalid. She has organized around issues of transformative justice, disability justice, and radical teaching and learning for twenty years. Her next book of poetry, Bodymap, and memoir, Dirty River, are forthcoming. For more info, see www.brownstargirl.org.
LeVar Burton
LeVar Burton is an actor, presenter, director, producer, and author. He published his science fiction book Aftermath (Aspect Press) in 1997. Burton is best known for his roles as Kunta Kinte in the 1977 award-winning ABC television miniseries Roots and as Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was the host and executive producer of the long-running PBS children’s series Reading Rainbow, which ran for twenty-three years, garnering over two hundred broadcast awards, including a Peabody Award and twenty-six Emmy Awards. Burton and his company RRKIDZ re-imagined Reading Rainbow as an iPad app in 2012, which became the number one educational app within thirty-six hours of its debut. In 2014, Burton ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to bring Reading Rainbow back as a Web-based show with free access available for schools in need.
Mia Mingus
Mia Mingus is a community organizer, writer, and educator working for disability justice and prison abolition via transformative justice and community accountability. She identifies as a queer physically disabled Korean woman transracial and transnational adoptee. She works for community, interdependency, and a home for all of us, not just some of us, and longs for a world where disabled children can live free of violence, with dignity and love. As her work for liberation evolves and deepens, her roots remain firmly planted in ending sexual violence. She works locally to build and support responses to child sexual abuse that do not rely on the state (i.e., police, prisons, the criminal legal system) with the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. Her writings can be found at leavingevidence.wordpress.com. This is her first foray into writing fiction.
Morrigan Phillips
Morrigan Phillips is an organizer, writer, Hufflepuff, and social worker living in Boston. Over the years, she has been a campaign and direct action organizer to thwart the forces of globalization. She currently works in the HIV/AIDS community in Boston, building networks of peer support and community-based programs to combat rising rates of infection. As a part of the Beautiful Trouble trainers network, Morrigan gets out and about doing direct action training. She is particularly enamored with creating and facilitating trainings that merge the power of imagined worlds with time-honored direct action training tools to find new and exacting avenues for radical change in the realms of climate justice, health access, public transportation, and more.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist who chronicles the human condition. He was a resident of Pennsylvania’s death row for twenty-nine years and is currently incarcerated at SCI Mahoney. Written from his solitary confinement cell, his essays have reached a worldwide audience. His books Live from Death Row, Death Blossoms: Reflections From a Prisoner of Conscience, All Things Censored, Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A, and The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America (with scholar Marc Lamont Hill) have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been translated into nine languages. Mumia Abu-Jamal was in his youth a Trekkie and has read and loved sci-fi from Asimov to Herbert and Butler to Bisson. Forthcoming: Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Sheree Renée Thomas
Sheree Renée Thomas writes in Tennessee between a river and a pyramid. She is the author of Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press) and editor of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, winners of the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards, respectively. A Clarion West ’99 grad, Sheree has served as a juror of the Speculative Fiction Foundation, the Carl Brandon Society, and the Tiptree Awards. Her own writing received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (16th and 17th eds.) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and two Rhysling Awards. Read her work in Eleven, Eleven; Strange Horizons; Mythic Delirium; storySouth; Callaloo; Meridians; Obsidian; Harpur Palate; The Moment of Change: Feminist Speculative Poetry; 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin; Mojo: Conjure Stories; Hurricane Blues; Bum Rush the Page; The Ringing Ear; Mythic 2; and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due is the former Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. She recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and in 2008 she won the Carl Brandon Society Kindred Award. Due and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote and coproduced a short film, Danger Word, based on their novel Devil’s Wake, which was nominated for best short narrative film at the Pan African Film Festival and BronzeLens Film Festival. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction, Due’s first short story collection, Ghost Summer and Other Stories, will be published in the summer of 2015 by Prime Books. She lives in Southern California with Steven Barnes and their son Jason.
Tara Betts
Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue and the libretto/chapbook THE GREATEST! A Tribute to Muhammad Ali. Tara earned her PhD in English and creative writing at SUNY Binghamton University. Her poems appear in Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler and several other anthologies. Her writings have appeared in Black Scholar, Essence, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, Xavier Review, Mosaic magazine, and Sounding Out!, a journal in sound studies. For more info: www.tarabetts.net.
Terry Bisson
Terry Bisson is a science fiction writer who lives in Oakland. He has also written biographies of Nat Turner and Mumia Abu-Jamal. His latest novel, Any Day Now (Overlook Press, 2012) is an alternate history of 1968.
Tunde Olaniran
Tunde Olaniran is a community-focused entertainer and educator specializing in the areas of gender, sexual equality, and sexual health and awareness. A long-time community activist and recording artist based in Flint, Michigan, he excels in merging arts programming and events with social issues–based learning workshops as a way to present new ideas and viewpoints to a diverse audience. He holds a master’s degree in nonprofit administration from the University of Michigan-Flint and is the manager of outreach for Planned Parenthood Mid and South Michigan.
Vagabond
Born in Brooklyn to a Jamaican father and Puerto Rican mother, Vagabond’s interest in art led him to become an artist, writer, and filmmaker. He studied fine and commercial art at a specialized high school in New York City and went on to study film at the School of Visual Arts. He dropped out of school to work with Spike Lee on Do The Right Thing and has worked in the film industry since then. He’s worked in the Puerto Rican independence movement since 1997 and has organized rallies, protests, and marches and created murals, pamphlets, and agitprop with the artist collective he helped found, the RICANSTRUCTION Netwerk. His work has been featured in Blu Magazine, AWOL, SALVO, Centro, Left Turn, and Liberator Magazine. His first feature film Machetero is about the ongoing struggle for Puerto Rican independence and has won awards in South Africa, Wales, England, Thailand, Ireland, and New York.
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Institute for Anarchist Studies
The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), a nonprofit foundation established in 1996, aims to support the development of anarchism by creating spaces for independent, politically engaged scholarship that explores social domination and reconstructive visions of a free society. All IAS projects strive to encourage public intellectuals and collective self-reflection within revolutionary and/or movement contexts. To this end, the IAS awards grants twice a year to radical writers and translators worldwide and has funded nearly a hundred projects over the years by authors from numerous countries, including Argentina, Lebanon, Canada, Chile, Ireland, Nigeria, Germany, South Africa, and the United States. It also publishes the journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory and the Lexicon pamphlet series, organizes anarchist theory tracks and other events, offers the Mutual Aid Speakers List, and collaborates with AK Press on a book series. The IAS is part of a larger movement seeking to create a nonhierarchical society. It is internally democratic and works in solidarity with people around the globe who share its values. The IAS is completely supported by donations from anarchists and other anti-authoritarians—like you—and their projects, with any contributions exclusively funding grants and paying IAS operating expenses. For more information or to contribute to the work of the IAS, see www.anarchist-studies.org.
AK Press
AK Press is a worker-run collective that publishes and distributes radical books, visual and audio media, and other material. We’re small: a dozen people who work long hours for short money because we believe in what we do. We’re anarchists, which is reflected both in the books we provide and the way we organize our business. Decisions at AK Press are made collectively, from what we publish to what we distribute to how we structure our labor. All the work, from sweeping floors to answering phones, is shared. When the telemarketers call and ask who’s in charge, the answer is: everyone. Our goal isn’t profit (although we do have to pay the rent). Our goal is supplying radical words and images to as many people as possible. The books and other media we distribute are published by independent presses, not the corporate giants. We make them widely available to help you make positive (or, hell, revolutionary) changes in the world. For more information on AK Press, or to place an order, see www.akpress.org.