Tara Sophia Bahna-James is a singer and mystic writer and a co-founder of Majority of One (www.majorityofone.org), which seeks to inspire humane and ethical practices in businesses and individuals through programs in the arts, education, and cross-community exchange. As a bookwriter and lyricist, Tara has co-authored seven musicals and has adapted the text for Robert Rival's Maya the Bee, for orchestra and narrator. Her academic writing has appeared in the Journal of Negro Education and will be featured in Lisa Kemmerer's upcoming anthology on women in animal advocacy.
Melissa Danielle is a New York–based community wellness advocate, sustainable food communicator, blogger, and photographer. Through her lifestyle company, she works with individuals and community groups to promote a seasonal, local, and whole foods approach to healthy living. For more information, visit www.MelissaDanielle.com.
Ain Drew was bred in Nashville and raised in Detroit and is now yet another Atlanta transplant. She maintains that her talent for writing was originally sparked by hip-hop and nourished by reading authors like Langston Hughes, Kwame Touré, Pearl Cleage, and James Baldwin. She's a poet by night who by day works diligently as a freelance writer and account coordinator for a boutique management and publicity firm. You can purchase her work on Lulu.com, search term: Ain Drew.
Delicia Dunham is an actress and vegan and lives in Chicago, Illinois. She has a B.A. in drama and English, a certificate in film and video studies from Duke University, and a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law. Delicia has been vegan since January 1, 2005, and is a member of numerous animal-rights organizations.
Ma'at Sincere Earth, born under the zodiac sign of Libra, seeks balance in everything, hence her name symbolizing supreme balance and truth. Head-wrapped before and after badu, she embraces the truth of Clarence X and sees herself as earth. A sky-diving, world-traveling, Baltimore native who grew up believing she would be the next Oprah, Ma'at is currently employed as the next Harriet Tubman, freeing inner city women's souls with education about breast health and cancer. She started the first Black literary magazine at her alma mater, Towson University. Vegan for seven years, vegetarian for eight years, she wants to be a raw foodist when she's much older and more stable. “Like Jay-Z say, I'm like Che Guevara with the bling on, I'm complex.”
Tasha Edwards is a personal trainer and teaches yoga, dance, and other fitness classes. She lives in Madison, Alabama, with her husband Tremayne and their two children, Jaizon and Xanyah.
Breeze Harper is currently a Ph.D. student at University of California, Davis, in the department of geography. Her passion is food and health geography as it pertains to females of the African diaspora living in the United States. To name a few, she has been inspired by bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, James Baldwin, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dick Gregory, Derrick Bell, Arundhati Roy, the Harper family, her husband Oliver Zahn, and the collective consciousness of Black womanists, Black feminists, and the plethora of global South scholars and activists that have come before her. She can be reached at breezeharper@gmail.com and her ongoing research can be found at www.breezeharper.com.
Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo enjoys sharing her knowledge of health and nutrition gleaned from twenty-five years as a vegetarian, twelve of them as a vegan. Her hobbies include studying all types of spirituality and learning about the lives of different people, especially women, the environment, and the so-called paranormal. She is fascinated by crystals, ancient Egypt, oracles such as the I Ching, and the effects of internalized oppression. She recently earned a dual masters in business administration and community economic development from Southern New Hampshire University and wants to spend the rest of her life building a more just and economic world. Ajowa believes every person has a unique story to tell others so that we can all learn from each other's lives. She is currently writing her memoir, Outside Child, about growing up as the child of the “other woman.” She lives in Washington, D.C., and can be reached at ajowa.ifateyo@gmail.com.
Janine Jackson, a native of Florida, has created in various aspects for ten years, using acrylic and oil paints, illustration software applications, image-editing programs, and standard pen and pencil to create works that focus on the strength and beauty found in every aspect of life. Her intentions are that viewers will experience abundance, introspection, and vitality while experiencing her work. In addition to working with several independent businesses, her creations served as inspiration for community-based radio station WMNF's identity items. A detail of her piece “Yum” graces the cover of this anthology. For further information, please contact: Janine Jackson, at janinejackson@peacemail.com.
pattrice jones, until recently, operated the Eastern Shore Sanctuary and taught at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Her book Aftershock: Confronting Trauma in a Violent World is available from Lantern Books. She thanks Mignon Anderson and Alka Chandna for their helpful advice on the preparation of an adequate afterword for this remarkable anthology. Thanks are also due to the participants in the 2007 Inadmissible Comparisons conference sponsored by United Poultry Concerns, at which some ideas that inform this essay evolved in the course of group discussions.
Robin Lee, on a self-imposed exile from biomedical inquiry, is a sister of the African diaspora from the South Bronx, New York (born and raised), and a vegetarian neat freak with a passion for animation and narrative writing. She would label herself a visual griot who chases questions with possible answers.
Michelle R. Loyd-Paige earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Purdue University in 1989. She is professor of sociology and the interim dean for multicultural affairs at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her most recent course offerings include Sociology of the African Diaspora, Diversity and Inequality in the United States, and A Christian Response to Racism. In addition to teaching, Dr. Loyd-Paige is an Afro-Christian scholar who studies and writes about the social and spiritual lives of African-American clergywomen; the transformational role of Afro-Christian worship; and the religious roadblocks that hinder the elimination of domestic violence. She is the founder of Preach Sistah! Inc., an organization that advocates for the inclusion of women in ministry roles and calls for the ending of domestic violence directed toward women. Dr. Loyd-Paige began eating like a vegan in 2005. She can be contacted by email at lopa@Calvin.edu or by U.S. Post at Preach Sistah! P.O. Box 4909, Muskegon Heights, Michigan, 49444. You can also contact her through her website: www.PreachSista.com.
Adama A. Maweja is minister on behalf of the Cosmic Community for Conscious Cosmic Citizenship, producer and host of The Meeting of the Inner Circle on 89.3 FM radio, WRFG Atlanta. She works on inspirational lifestyle change as a holistic wellness consultant. She is a creative expressionist of life, light, wisdom, and truth in the media of movement, rhythm, verse, and sound. She can be contacted through her website: www.AdamaSpeaks.com.
Tashee Meadows is simply an artist/activist currently residing in Alabama.
Thea Moore currently works as a pharmacist specializing in mental health. She has interest in alternative healing and, more specifically, herbal remedies. She has been vegan since early 2001. It has been a steady process for her. She originally stopped eating pork and beef in September of 1997 and then stopped eating poultry about six months later and became a complete ovo-lacto vegetarian in 1998. When she started reading more and also recognized that dairy was the cause of some very painful menstruation, she decided to become vegan. At this point, she told her father that she was “giving up dairy, too.” He replied, “What are you going to give up next? Air? Are you going to stop breathing?”
Layli Phillips is associate professor of women's studies and associate faculty of African-American studies at Georgia State University, where she teaches courses on womanism, Black feminist thought, women and hip hop, and African-American LGBTQQI activism. She is the editor of The Womanist Reader (Routledge, 2006), an anthology documenting the first quarter century of womanist thought “on its own.” Her emerging research interests include applied womanism and spiritual activism, as well as natural healing modalities and transpersonal psychology. She has been a vegetarian off and on since high school and has been a vegan since 2004.
Joi Marie Probus has been an ethical vegan since 2002 and resides in Houston, Texas, where she is the director of volunteer services at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In addition to animal welfare, she is actively involved in charity work in support of autism awareness, the arts, and human rights. She currently serves on the executive board of the Friends of Avondale House, a nonprofit agency that provides a school, a day habilitation program, and residential services for children and young adults with autism.
Iya Raet is a mother, birth doula, and the author of the book Holistic Parenting from the Pan-Afrikan Perspective. For more information go to www.afrikanparenting.com.
Angelique Shofar is a holistic health practitioner and artiste with a designed role as holistic relationship, love, and sexuality expert and sensual lifestyle coach. She founded the Spirit of Wellness in celebration of the birth of her son and the triumph of her self-healing efforts. With yoga and dance at the heart of her life and spiritual practice, she adds a touch of sensual movement to her style of Soulfull Yoga. Her repertoire of healing modalities includes her background and training as a Kripalu yoga teacher, certified massage therapist, energy and movement therapist, and reflexologist. She fuses her passion for astrology and her intuitive healing gifts with cultural therapeutic practices derived from the African, Asian, and Native American traditions. She is a freelance writer, talk show host (formerly of Pacifica Radio), and new media producer. She has been featured in the New York Times, ABCNews.com, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, Voice of America, XM Satellite Radio, Heart & Soul Magazine, and other online and international publications and media outlets. She is publisher of The Cultural Erotic Link! Visit her blog at sexualgriot.blogspot.com.
Melissa Santosa is a vegan of ten years who shares her life with Sahr, a vegetarian of fourteen years, vegan five of those years. They live in Dover, Delaware, where she and Sahr graduated from Delaware State University. Melissa works as a mediation coordinator at the Center for Community Justice, spends her free time reading to kids at a shelter in her neighborhood, being a big sister to Tre, kickboxing, and going through training to volunteer at a rape crisis hotline. When she isn't wandering through the park with a book or writing letters, she's fattening up her friends and family with vegan food. Her biggest goal is to translate isolated vegan and globally conscious lifestyle into active community building. Any suggestions?
Mary Spears has been a vegan for fifteen years. She has a background in visual arts but started writing poetry as a teenager. She is interested in nutrition, veganism, and animal rights. Mary lives in Washington, D.C., with her daughter and her cat.
Venus Taylor, Ed.M., is a certified family and relationship coach and founder of Paramount Family Coaching (www.paramountfamilycoaching.com). She is a raw-food vegan but still cooks vegan meals for her husband and two homeschooled children, ages twelve and fifteen. They reside in Boston, Massachusetts.
Tishana Joy Trainor is a thirty-four-year-old vegan mother of two teenagers. Currently, she is studying electronic engineering at DeVry University in Atlanta, Georgia. Tishana strives to improve public transportation and recycling techniques.
Psyche Williams-Forson is assistant professor in the department of American studies and an affiliate of the women's studies and African-American studies departments at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power.
Olu Butterfly Woods is creative director of BlackOut Studios where she coproduces many events, including Organic Soul Tuesdays, a weekly independent art venue, and is cofounding director of Poetry for the People Baltimore, a community organization of renegade brilliant poet-activists. This award-winning author of The Revenge of Dandelions tours the world with the soul jazz world band Fertile Ground, Sankofa Dance Theater, as well as independently. Visit: www.olubutterfly.com.
Nia Yaa-Nebthet is a certified Ra Sekhi Kemetic Reiki Master and for the past eight years has taught throughout the United States. She is a heal-thyself ambassador of wellness, natural healer, priestess, community activist, holistic health consultant, spiritual warrior, sacred woman, educator, mother, tree hugger, nature lover, vegan, and promoter of health, wellness, and natural living. She is currently offering reactivating sessions, services, and workshops. For more info visit www.rasekhi.webs.com.