We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition with MAYA SCHENWAR & KIM WILSON

We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition with MAYA SCHENWAR & KIM WILSON

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Parenting Toward Abolition
A Conversation with MAYA SCHENWAR & KIM WILSON about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars, and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms. It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.

How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together: Conversation w/ DEAN SPADE - Highlights

How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together: Conversation w/ DEAN SPADE - Highlights

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Conversation with DEAN SPADE about How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together

This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.

LOVE in a F*cked-Up World: DEAN SPADE on How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together

LOVE in a F*cked-Up World: DEAN SPADE on How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together

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This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.

Speaking Out of Place: SARA AHMED discusses The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

Speaking Out of Place: SARA AHMED discusses The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

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Author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook
Independent Queer Feminist Scholar

You're more likely to progress if you say yes. It's a reproductive mechanism, which is why feminist culture knows so much about everything. We can explain how it is that institutions keep being reproduced in the same way. So what then do you do? Where do you go if your no has nowhere to go? And I think when you say no to the world, and you're pushed out by it, you still find your people. And that there's the world-making is in the people who find in the refusal of the institution a common ground.

Speaking Out of Place: CHING-IN CHEN & KATE HAO discuss the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

Speaking Out of Place: CHING-IN CHEN & KATE HAO discuss the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

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on the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The longstanding event had been on hiatus because of the pandemic, so this year’s event had generated a lot of buzz.  Organized by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), the event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states. Ching-In Chen is a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers. Kate Hao is a program coordinator who was on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival.

Highlights - Sonnet L’Abbé - Poet, Songwriter, Editor of “Best Canadian Poetry in English”

Highlights - Sonnet L’Abbé - Poet, Songwriter, Editor of “Best Canadian Poetry in English”

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Award-winning Poet · Songwriter · Author of Sonnet’s Shakespeare
Editor of Best Canadian Poetry in English

Sonnet’s Shakespeare itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean… And I was looking at critical writing about it, and I couldn't find anything that talked about the role of the poet who is doing that as censorial or as somehow violencing the original text. I was thinking about my resonance with the word erasure and thinking about censoring and deleting what somebody else has already said resonates with me as an analogy for being black, being mixed race, being racialized, and non-European in spaces that are predominantly Anglo-Canadian. One tries very hard. At least I did as a child, as a teenager, to just try to fit in and make my visible difference as minimal, as invisible as possible. So it's a way of thinking about erasing the self. And so I took that theme and thought, How do I show through a poetic erasure this dynamic of self-erasure and feeling erased?

Sonnet L’Abbé - Award-winning Poet, Songwriter, Author of “Sonnet’s Shakespeare”

Sonnet L’Abbé - Award-winning Poet, Songwriter, Author of “Sonnet’s Shakespeare”

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Award-winning Poet · Songwriter · Author of Sonnet’s Shakespeare
Editor of Best Canadian Poetry in English

Sonnet’s Shakespeare itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean… And I was looking at critical writing about it, and I couldn't find anything that talked about the role of the poet who is doing that as censorial or as somehow violencing the original text. I was thinking about my resonance with the word erasure and thinking about censoring and deleting what somebody else has already said resonates with me as an analogy for being black, being mixed race, being racialized, and non-European in spaces that are predominantly Anglo-Canadian. One tries very hard. At least I did as a child, as a teenager, to just try to fit in and make my visible difference as minimal, as invisible as possible. So it's a way of thinking about erasing the self. And so I took that theme and thought, How do I show through a poetic erasure this dynamic of self-erasure and feeling erased?

Highlights - Cynthia Daniels - Grammy - Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

Highlights - Cynthia Daniels - Grammy - Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

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Grammy & Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

We all are looking for a little magic in our lives, and I think that's what art and the creative process allow for, above all. In a world that can be either way too predictable and mundane and create tedium, the creative mind, for me, is the curious mind and the mind that's always learning and allowing yourself to make mistakes. To generate from your core, from your soul, and from your experience something new and experimental and something that is unique to yourself.

Cynthia Daniels - Grammy and Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

Cynthia Daniels - Grammy and Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

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Grammy & Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

We all are looking for a little magic in our lives, and I think that's what art and the creative process allow for, above all. In a world that can be either way too predictable and mundane and create tedium, the creative mind, for me, is the curious mind and the mind that's always learning and allowing yourself to make mistakes. To generate from your core, from your soul, and from your experience something new and experimental and something that is unique to yourself.

(Highlights) Mario Alberto Zambrano · Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Dir. of Dance, The Juilliard School

(Highlights) Mario Alberto Zambrano · Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Dir. of Dance, The Juilliard School

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Dancer, Writer, Choreographer
Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School, NYC

In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?

Mario Alberto Zambrano - Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Director of Dance, The Juilliard School

Mario Alberto Zambrano - Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Director of Dance, The Juilliard School

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Dancer, Writer, Choreographer
Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School, NYC

In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?

Highlights - Isabel Sandoval - Director of "Lingua Franca" - “Under the Banner of Heaven”

Highlights - Isabel Sandoval - Director of "Lingua Franca" - “Under the Banner of Heaven”

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Director of Lingua Franca & Under the Banner of Heaven

Before coming on board Under the Banner of Heaven, I had very little knowledge of Mormonism, but having read the script by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is also the showrunner for the show, I resonated deeply with Jeb Pyre (played by Andrew Garfield) when it comes to his growing ambivalence and his crisis of faith. And the more he learned about the gruesome, grisly history of the founding Mormonism, and also about the case that he was investigating, the more disillusioned and disenchanted he was becoming. And that resonated with me because I was raised Catholic in the Philippines, but as I grew older, actually went to Catholic schools and universities from kindergarten until college, and then the more I learned about the history of the Catholic Church and the atrocities and the injustices that it has committed, especially in the name of colonialist and imperialist pursuits in the Middle ages, the more I questioned its control over me and my life.

Isabel Sandoval - Director of “Lingua Franca” - “Under the Banner of Heaven”

Isabel Sandoval - Director of “Lingua Franca” - “Under the Banner of Heaven”

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Director of Lingua Franca & Under the Banner of Heaven

Before coming on board Under the Banner of Heaven, I had very little knowledge of Mormonism, but having read the script by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is also the showrunner for the show, I resonated deeply with Jeb Pyre (played by Andrew Garfield) when it comes to his growing ambivalence and his crisis of faith. And the more he learned about the gruesome, grisly history of the founding Mormonism, and also about the case that he was investigating, the more disillusioned and disenchanted he was becoming. And that resonated with me because I was raised Catholic in the Philippines, but as I grew older, actually went to Catholic schools and universities from kindergarten until college, and then the more I learned about the history of the Catholic Church and the atrocities and the injustices that it has committed, especially in the name of colonialist and imperialist pursuits in the Middle ages, the more I questioned its control over me and my life.

(Highlights) Tey Meadow · Author of “Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century"

(Highlights) Tey Meadow · Author of “Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century"

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Author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Co-editor of Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology

So while there is no kind of one size fits all story, there are plenty of times when...kind of like clusters of activity. And some kids don't come out as trans. They come out as wanting to begin a process of exploration around gender, wanting to sort of bend things a little bit or begin to present themselves in slightly different ways without a concrete cross-identification.

Tey Meadow · Author of “Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century"

Tey Meadow · Author of “Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century"

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Author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Co-editor of Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology

So while there is no kind of one size fits all story, there are plenty of times when...kind of like clusters of activity. And some kids don't come out as trans. They come out as wanting to begin a process of exploration around gender, wanting to sort of bend things a little bit or begin to present themselves in slightly different ways without a concrete cross-identification.

(Highlights) Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

(Highlights) Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

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YA Writer & Poet
Author of Pillow Thoughts & I Hope You Stay

I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.

Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

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YA Writer & Poet
Author of Pillow Thoughts & I Hope You Stay

I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.

(Highlights) TREVA B. LINDSEY
TREVA B. LINDSEY
(Highlights) CARMEN MARIA MACHADO