Adam Nyang

Adam Nyang (she/her) is a Gambian who recently completed her Bachelor’s degree in English Studies at the University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fes, Morocco. Adam has always been passionate about storytelling and reading. She recently published a romance novel, Betting on Love, under the pen-name Kani Sey with Love Africa Press. Her short story, “Faroh,” has been longlisted for the 2021 K and L Prize.

Writing Project: A psychological realism novel that will depict youth, sexual awakening, desire, friendship and family. It will dive deep into the struggles of Penda, who lives with mental illness for years without a diagnosis. When she travels to Morocco on a scholarship and experiences a severe depressive episode and a suicide attempt, she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Aishah Shahid Simmons

Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) produces award-winning cultural work in documentary filmmaking, writing, and public speaking. For 28 years, she has lectured, facilitated workshops, and taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the US and internationally. Aishah is also a trauma-informed Mindfulness Meditation teacher who has studied and practised Buddhism for 20 years. Since 2003, she has integrated her dharma studies and practices to inform the creation of her work. She is the editor of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press) and the producer/director of the 2006-released groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded film, NO! The Rape Documentary. Love, Justice, and Dharma, her memoir in process, is the capstone of her trilogy of work that breaks silences, centers healing, and seeks humane accountability for harm. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships, including a Soros Media Fellowship and a 4-year Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellowship.

Writing Project: I believe childhood sexual violence within the family is the frontier and foundation for most forms of violence. Love, Justice, and Dharma tells the story of unaddressed child sexual abuse that I experienced in my Black radical family and my subsequent healing journey. It connects the dots between intrafamilial violence and interpersonal violence within the context of systemic violence committed against Black people. I do not dismiss nor condone the harm I experienced, witnessed, and also caused in the name of any greater issue. Instead, I seek to understand the harm that often lives in the shades of grey with deep compassion, understanding, and love WITH accountability® to heal and stop the cycles.

Beth Howard

Beth Howard (she/her) is Showing Up for Racial Justice’s (SURJ) Appalachia Director. In this capacity, she leads SURJ’s strategy in the region to build a working class base, win issue-based and electoral campaigns and develop a strong multiracial movement ecosystem. In 2020, Beth created the viral narrative campaign “Rednecks for Black Lives” and has been featured in the “Matter of Fact Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brien,” NPR’s “Here and Now,” “Now This News,” the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, the New York Times, and she published an op-ed in The Boston Globe. She is working on her political memoir Rednecks for Black Lives. Beth grew up in a rural, white working class community in Eastern Kentucky, and has been organizing in the American South for 17 years. Prior to her work at SURJ, she was the Deputy Director of Leadership Development at Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC) and the lead organizer with Fighting Against Injustice Toward Harmony (FAITH) in Volusia County, Florida, a Direct Action Research and Training (DART) affiliate. Beth has led members to win issue campaigns to raise the minimum wage, restore voting rights, and win treatment programs for incarcerated people, in addition to contributing to winning electoral campaigns in the South.

Writing Project: Rednecks for Black Lives (working title) is a political memoir centered around my story growing up working class in a majority white rural community in Appalachia. It is the story of how I became a revolutionary, a self proclaimed “Redneck,” and an organizer. The memoir will weave together stories from my life, including lessons and strategy from my 15 years of organizing experience. The book culminates in a call to action for poor and working class white people in Appalachia to take up the call for racial justice and class solidarity.

Catherine Hyde Townsend

Catherine Hyde Townsend (she/her) serves as the Senior Advisor for Disability Inclusion at the Ford Foundation where she leads an intersectional approach to disability inclusion in its grant making and operations. Catherine combines her personal disability experience with a wealth of professional expertise to build disability cultural competence and connect disability to broader social justice issues, such as racial and gender justice, sexuality, and the future of work.

From 2006 until 2017, Catherine worked as a senior program officer for human rights at the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. There she launched funding portfolios to protect human rights defenders and advance disability rights. In 2007, Catherine helped launch the Disability Rights Fund, serving as the co-chair of the Board of Directors for more than a decade. She currently serves as the Board President of Women Enabled International, which advances human rights at the intersection of gender and disability.

Writing Project: Tentatively titled Disabling Philanthropy: The Reshaping of Power and Identity, is a co-authored book (with Diana Samarasan) that will document the journey to build the Disability Rights Fund (DRF) embodying “nothing about us without us.” DRF’s story—not always easy—is the story of shifting decision-making to people with lived experience. From the Fund’s modest start, it has provided more than $40 million to the disability rights movement, modeling how philanthropy can (and must) change the way we work, to whom we listen, and to whom we are ultimately accountable. The book will illustrate what is possible when we have structures that recognize the power of all individuals and collective iteration. By including insights of disability rights activists who have been collaborators and friends, the book will uplift the disability rights notion of interdependence and the reality of intersectionality.

Devon Hamilton

Devon Hamilton (he/him) is a food justice advocate with a deeply intersectional background in community organizing, youth education, sustainable agriculture, and the culinary arts, among other roles. He is the owner of a local barbecue and gardening business called Grillin’ For The People (G4TP) that offers community resources and food services primarily in the Leimert Park and South Central LA area.

Writing Project: The Inkwell Beach Series is a collection of stories and recipes inspired by historic Black beach sites (“Inkwells”) across the United States and elsewhere. Pre-Civil Rights era, Black people faced a spectrum of experiences accessing public beaches, most often restrictive or violent by design. These stories, and the range of their political and cultural influence, reverberate throughout Black history and experience in ways that affect our relationship with land and the environment to this day. This history, and the re-imagination of Black-beach food culture, will be documented following a national tour visiting over a dozen Inkwell sites and interviewing various key voices associated with their influence.

Diana Samarasan

Diana Samarasan (she/her) is an independent consultant specializing in participatory grant making and disability rights and inclusion. She served as the Founding Executive Director of the Disability Rights Fund (DRF), a participatory grant maker that helped pioneer the inclusion of people with lived experience in global donor decision-making. Starting from an initial grant making budget of less than a million dollars in 2008, DRF raised enough funding in Diana’s tenure to re-grant over $40 million to organizations of persons with disabilities in the Global South.

Diana’s work has been featured in numerous publications, including Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good By Giving Up Control and Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking. Before DRF, Diana directed a legal advocacy organization in Budapest, Hungary, which defends the rights of institutionalized persons with disabilities. She also worked with the American Refugee Committee and Doctors of the World. Diana is a Board member of the Center for Inclusive Policy, the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, and the Harvard Alumni Disability Alliance.

Writing Project: Tentatively titled Disabling Philanthropy: The Reshaping of Power and Identity, is a co-authored book (with Catherine Hyde Townsend) that will document the journey to build the Disability Rights Fund (DRF) embodying “nothing about us without us.” DRF’s story—not always easy—is the story of shifting decision-making to people with lived experience. From the Fund’s modest start, it has provided more than $40 million to the disability rights movement, modeling how philanthropy can (and must) change the way we work, to whom we listen, and to whom we are ultimately accountable. The book will illustrate what is possible when we have structures that recognize the power of all individuals and collective iteration. By including insights of disability rights activists who have been collaborators and friends, the book will uplift the disability rights notion of interdependence and the reality of intersectionality.

Ellen Bravo

Ellen Bravo (she/her) is a long-time activist and author who’s spent decades organizing among low-wage women from a social justice feminist framework. She’s written several non-fiction books, including Taking on the Big Boys. Her first novel, Again and Again, dealt with date rape and politics. Her second, Standing Up: Tales of Struggle, written with her husband, highlights moments when workers band together to stand up to oppression. As part of the Changemakers Authors Cohort, she’s completing Americanida (the Greek word for an American woman), inspired by her experiences in the Greek movement in Montreal more than fifty years ago.

Writing Project: Americanida is the story of a woman finding her own voice in a world of contradictions. Miriam Cohen Grigorakis is the only woman, only non-Greek, and only Jew in a Montreal group organizing against the Greek dictatorship in the late 1960s. Her emerging feminism is viewed as a form of American imperialism. As she seesaws between being Miritsa Grigorakis in the Greek community and Miriam Cohen in the rest of her life, she braces for the day her exiled husband will be able to return to Greece and wonders who she will be if she goes with him.

Emily Ramirez

Emily Ramirez (she/her) is a queer Dominican woman, born and raised in NYCHA housing in Brooklyn, and is currently a digital organizer at Families Belong Together and a social justice teacher/curriculum developer at the Sadie Nash Leadership Project and at Girls Be Heard. She holds a Bachelor’s in creative writing and comparative literature, and has published works in Huizache, Girls Write Now: Two Decades of True Stories From Young Female Voices, and the journal Wizards in Space.

An avid reader, Emily facilitates a monthly book club that centers the fiction of women of color through her book review Instagram at @readwithemily.

Writing Project: In The Haunting in Casa #13, Ellie is a 12-year-old Dominican American girl who is secretly falling in love with a girl while on summer vacation visiting the campos of her family’s hometown in Santiago, Dominican Republic. Though shy, Ellie is steadfast in fighting her older brother Johnny’s controlling nature that keeps her from being comfortable in her own skin and coming out to the family she loves. During their time in the motherland, Johnny terrorizes Ellie with tales of how “El Cuco,” the blood-sucking demon Dominican children grow up afraid of, will come find her if she steps into the depraved inclinations he is running from himself. As Ellie challenges the machismo that torments her growing desires, she grows into herself and her queerness, and in doing so discovers her voice.

Grace Jahng Lee

Born stateless in Seoul and raised on four continents, Grace Jahng Lee (she/her/they) is a writer, editor, harm reductionist, and public health practitioner who has worked for two decades with people experiencing homelessness, queer/BIPOC/immigrant communities, sex workers, and people who use drugs. Fragmented identities, memory, addiction, intergenerational trauma, and home are central themes in her writing. She has been awarded residencies, fellowships, scholarships, and grants from VONA, Kundiman, Yaddo, Brooklyn Arts Council, NYFA, Hedgebrook, Hambidge, and the Jerome Foundation, among others. She is a contributing editor at Guernica and the creative nonfiction editor and health editor at Hyphen.

Writing Project: A book about a Korean immigrant family struggling to piece together fragmented lives. The story is situated within intergenerational histories of colonization by Japan and the U.S. military. What does it mean to belong? How do we find home and community?

Hans Lindahl

Hans Lindahl (Hans) is a writer who brings community perspectives on intersex topics to medical schools and popular media. This work builds on the blessing of a childhood spent among multiple generations of intersex activists.

As the former Communications Director of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, Hans’s organizing and digital strategies helped pass the country’s first legislation denouncing intersex genital surgeries, California’s SCR-110. Hans’s articles, videos, and comics offering affirming frameworks for human sex diversity have been translated into four languages.

Hans’s debut book asks, “How do you come of age when puberty never happens?” The forthcoming YA graphic novel romance tackles intersex medical abuse and the variety of forms queer love can take. Read more at HansLindahl.com.

Writing Project: How do you come of age when puberty never happens? I’m Going Through Something is a YA graphic novel romance that tackles intersex medical abuse and the variety of forms queer love can take.

Jess Clarke

Jess Clarke (they) is a genderqueer writer, performer, and organizer from Oakland, California. They’ve been on the frontlines and in the back offices of justice struggles for the last half-century. Whether organizing a cultural center in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in the 1980s, solidarity work with the Zapatistas in the 1990s, editing Race, Poverty & the Environment in the 2000s, or launching Radio Reimagine in the 2020s, liberation of all kinds—personal, social, economic and political—is the common goal of their projects. Jess has been a featured performer at the Oakland Museum, Oakland Public Library, Marsh Theater SF & Berkeley, Story Slam Oakland and Berkeley Repertory School of Theater.

Writing Project: Imagining Liberation follows a nonbinary Irish Catholic kid through the permutations of their identity through the decades. The memoir kicks off with the narrator exploring gender-free names in a 1960s Catholic church service, fighting for peace in Vietnam, and then investigating androgyny and sexuality while living alternately in KKK Maryland with a 13-member “blended family” and their mother’s various hippie collectives in Mendocino and Washington, DC. From these formative roots, Jess launches into a broader world of political and social movements: confronting Henry Kissinger on the Columbia campus; challenging South African apartheid; co-creating a cultural center in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district; and other organizing breakthroughs. The book deals with gender identity, racial justice, and sexual assault but grounds these big themes in compelling stories that stay close to the narrator’s life.

Malkia Devich Cyril

Malkia Devich Cyril (they/them) is a writer, public speaker, and award-winning activist on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation, and collective grief. Devich Cyril was the founding executive director of MediaJustice, a national hub boldly advancing racial justice, rights, and dignity in a digital age. After more than 20 years of media justice leadership, Devich Cyril now serves as a Senior Fellow at both MediaJustice and at Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity.

Writing Project: Through a combination of personal storytelling and political essay, the book Radical Loss: Black Grief Can Change the World refutes the notion of privatized grief and proclaims American grief as both a source of generational trauma and inequality and as a powerful driver for new grief-informed approaches to civil rights that can accelerate fights for racial justice and strengthen democracy beyond our wildest dreams. Autobiographical in nature, this creative nonfiction book tells the tumultuous story of a Black activist’s journey with personal loss alongside the nation’s collective journey with highly charged public loss. Poetic, deeply personal, and interdisciplinary, Radical Loss attempts to answer the question: How can a polarized nation in the midst of multiple crises model a politicized, radicalized grief that can transform loss into shared grievance with the power to forge belonging, in order to construct new meaning and conditions that can bring about the democracy we all deserve?

Panthea Lee

Panthea Lee (she/they) is a strategist, curator, facilitator, and mediator working for structural justice and collective liberation. She builds and supports coalitions of community leaders, artists, healers, activists, and institutions to win dignity and joy for all. Panthea currently serves as the Executive Director of Reboot and is a fellow at the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab and at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and Imagination. She is a pioneer in guiding diverse coalitions to tackle complex social challenges, with experience doing so in more than 30 countries, with partners including UNDP, CIVICUS, Wikimedia, MacArthur Foundation, the City of New York, as well as civil society groups and governments from local to federal.

Writing Project: In Joyous Solidarity is a meditation on awakening, a call for defiant hope amidst debilitating despair, and a roadmap for how we come together before our world falls apart. Ethnographer, organizer, and mediator Panthea draws upon her experience fighting for our shared humanity across 30+ countries—from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe to the United States—to deconstruct the lies within dominant theories of social change, and to explore how we win not just reform but revolution. She excavates her Taiwanese ancestral wisdom and weaves it with research and practices from radical history, healing justice, collective care, and liberatory art, to illuminate a path towards structural justice.

Rosemary “Rockie” Rivera

Rosemary “Rockie” Rivera (she/her) started her career in the movement as a directly impacted volunteer. Growing up as a New YoRican in the system, Rosemary experienced firsthand the injustices within multiple systems. In 2005 she joined Citizen Action, where she learned of systemic oppression and how it works. Rosemary began as a community organizer and in 2019 became the Co-Executive Director of Citizen Action of New York and the Public Policy and Education Fund. She serves on several boards and is the state chair of the Alliance for Quality Education.

Writing Project: This memoir will take the reader on a journey into the two worlds that I have lived in: the streets and the movement. There are many similarities and stark differences between those worlds when it comes to power, self-interest, loyalty, and the relationship with money. My story is one of an 11-year-old heroin addict from NYC who became the Co-Executive Director of one of the largest grassroots social and political organizations in New York state, and how I found a purpose-driven life in a world filled with every “ism” that predicted I would only be a statistic. At points in this journey, I have found that the moral superiority of one world over the other is debatable.

Roula AbiSamra

Roula AbiSamra (she/they) is the eldest daughter of Lebanese immigrants who settled in New Orleans. For a brown girl in the South and a Catholic school alum, becoming a reproductive justice activist was unheard of and yet somehow inevitable. Today Roula lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and serves as State Campaign Director with the Amplify Georgia Collaborative, a Southern BIPOC-led coalition organizing for abortion access. She believes many good things that are unheard of can also be somehow inevitable when we honor our convictions

Writing Project: I was racialized by 9/11, politicized by slut-shaming, and radicalized by survivor’s guilt after Hurricane Katrina and the “July War” on Beirut devastated both of my homes. Growing up, we visited our family in Lebanon as often as we could, until 2006 when sustained Israeli airstrikes caused us to evacuate. That wasn’t my last visit to the old country, but it began a years-long battle with despair and search for meaning. Through activism and organizing and truth-telling, I’ve gone on to forge a path that does mean something. But for many years, I kept within myself the stories of the bombings, the travels, my ancestors, my young siblings, learning I was different, learning I belonged, and much more—the stories of being a young brown child of the Middle East in the American South.

Shannon Cumberbatch

Shannon Cumberbatch (she/her) is the founder and facilitator of Uproot.ed, programming committed to uprooting oppression through education and action. She has several years of managerial leadership and consulting experience implementing more equitable policies and practices within a variety of small and large institution. Shannon also has experience creating comprehensive training curricula as an educator, and advocating for marginalized people ensnared in oppressive legal systems as a public defense attorney. Shannon’s approach to anti-oppression work is also informed by her own lived experience as a Black woman directly harmed by institutional and interpersonal acts of oppression, as well as her study of critical race theory, radical Black feminist/womanist tradition, teachings of grassroots community organizers, disability justice advocates, PIC abolitionists and transformative justice practitioners.

Writing Project: It’s The Least We Can Do: Critical Steps Toward Uprooting Inequity in Your Institution (working title) is a nonfiction instructive resource for those seeking to uproot oppression in their ethos and implement more equitable policies and practices. The text will explicitly discuss how racism, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, cisheteronormativity, ableism, classism, elitism, and the intersection of each permeate common policies and practices embraced in institutions. It will unpack oppressive conventions and offer tools for transformation in recruiting, hiring, and retention; crafting institutional policies; cultivating an anti-oppressive office culture; and sustainably supporting marginalized peoples within the institution, including amid uprisings against systemic oppression in the world. The subject matter will be be rooted in principles borne out of radical Black feminist tradition, prison industrial complex abolition, transformative justice, and disability justice frameworks. I will incorporate storytelling and narrative weaving to illustrate how inequities manifest within institutions and impact people pushed to the margins.

Silky Shah

Silky Shah (she/her) is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for 20 years.

Writing Project: My book project, Free Them All: Abolition and the Fight for Immigrant Justice, contends that the prison industrial complex and U.S. immigration enforcement policy are not separate, as is commonly understood, but are intertwined systems of repression, and that to fully achieve justice for immigrants we must embrace prison abolition. The book provides an anatomy of the last 40 years of immigrant incarceration, an analysis of the efforts and failures of the immigrant rights movement to come to grips with increasing criminalization, and strategies for dismantling both systems.

Trevor Smith

Trevor Smith (he/him) is a writer, researcher, and strategist focused on topics such as racial inequality, wealth inequality, reparations, and narrative change. As the Director of Narrative Change at Liberation Ventures, a field builder fueling the movement for Black-led racial repair, he is building the Reparations Narrative Lab (RNL). The RNL is a first-of-its-kind creative space designed to build narrative power behind reparations. He is also the creator, curator, and editor of the Reparations Daily (ish) newsletter.

Writing Project: Lethal Stereotypes: How Stories Take Black Lives illuminate how the stories we have told about race have always served to degrade, dehumanize, or exploit Blackness and have led to the creation of harmful and dangerous narratives. When aggregated, these harmful narratives coalesce to create a lethal environment where Black lives are taken easily. Through the life stories of various Black people, Lethal Stereotypes show how the stories we tell are more dangerous than we might think

Vinay Krishnan

Vinay Krishnan (he/him) is a writer, organizer, and attorney living in Brooklyn. He is the National Field Organizer with the Center for Popular Democracy, where he works to expand and improve healthcare in America. Vinay’s non-fiction has appeared in SLAM Magazine and The Forge. His fiction has appeared in Barren Magazine. Vinay is working on his book We Are Not Math Problems—Ableism, Abundance, and Justice in America.

Writing Project: As we work to create a world in which every one of us can thrive, we must confront the ableist roots of every system and structure in this country. We Are Not Math Problems—Ableism, Abundance, and Justice in America is a book of essays that examine how ableism drives capitalism, white supremacy, and incarceration. These essays will push us to transform these systems and create a new world grounded in values of disability justice, one that honors and protects the inherent dignity of every person.