2022 SPEAKERS
Rukia Monique Rogers
Jonathan Peraza Campos
Jonathan received his undergraduate degree in 2018 from Emory University. He completed his Master’s in Social Foundations of Education at Georgia State University in 2021, and he is currently pursuing a second Master’s degree in History and Latinx/Latin American Studies.
Kaitlin Woodward
The social unrest of summer 2020 in the US only further ignited the flame within her to create a better tomorrow. She has been on the ground and in the streets alongside organizers and community members by attending demonstrations, donating money, and starting a revolutionary texts-based reading club with her peers. In her lifetime she aspires to work in museums with the hopes of opening a women’s history museum later in her career.
William C. Anderson
Chino Mayday
Lamont Carter
Vicky Osterweil
Matthew Johnson
Matthew Johnson (he/him/they) is an activist and minister in atlanta. He is currently serving as interim executive director of BelovedCommunity.
Modibo Kadalie
Modibo Kadalie (he/him) is the Founding Convener of the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology and is a lifelong radical activist, political theorist, and social ecologist. Modibo’s most recent book, Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom, is a critical reexamination of the history and historiography surrounding two sites of African maroonage in North America: the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina; and Fort Mose in Florida. In the book, he argues that maroon communities were actually ethnically diverse sites where freedom-seekers fleeing oppressive societies established socially intimate forms of democracy, echoing longstanding directly democratic traditions from both Africa and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Abundia Alvarado
Abundia Alvarado (she/her) is a Nahuatl-Apache [naa·Waa·tul Ah-pah-che] Trans femme migrant from Tenochtitlan [Teh-no-cheet-lan] (so called Mexico city). She is a community organizer for food autonomy, indigenous rights, LGTBQI2S rights, and more. Currently she is working on mutual aid regional systems in the South of so-called USA, primarily on Muscogee lands. She is the co-founder of the Atlanta agriculturalist collective Mariposas Rebeldes and member of the Weelaunee [Wee-law-nee] Coalition, a group dedicated to defending Weelaunee Forest from destruction and stopping the construction of Cop City.
2019 SPEAKERS
Eusi Kwayana
Eusi Kwayana is a revolutionary Pan-Africanist and independent socialist activist, teacher, and writer from Guyana. During the struggle for Guyanese independence, Kwayana was imprisoned by the British army in 1954. In 1956, he founded County High School (later renamed Republic Cooperative High School) in Buxton, Guyana. In 1964, he co-founded the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), an Afro-Guyanese socialist and anti-colonialist organization that became part of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in 1974. That organization was founded in part by Kwayana’s comrade Walter Rodney, who was assassinated in 1980.
Throughout his lifetime of social activism, Eusi Kwayana has advocated politics of direct democracy and working-class self-management. In his writings, he emphasizes that revolutionary change comes from among the ranks or ordinary people, through their own self-organization. His book The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics (1972) documents an early 1970s bauxite miners’ strike in Guyana during which striking workers organized themselves under the slogan “Every man is his own leader and we are leaderless” and directed their strike efforts through mass assemblies and direct-democratic councils.
Modibo Kadalie
During the early and middle 1970′s, Modibo Kadalie was an active member of several radical organizations. In the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), he served as a member of the Central Staff. He was Chair of the People’s Action Committee in Highland Park, Michigan. In the International African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), Kadalie was a founding member of the National Steering Committee. He chaired the Detroit local committee in 1972 and 1973, and then continued as a member of the expanded International Steering Committee as a representative from Atlanta, 1973-1975. Within the Sixth Pan-African Congress, he chaired the Southern Regional Organizing Committee from 1974-1975 and was also a member of both the North American Delegation and the North American Left Revolutionary Pan-African Caucus.
Modibo Kadalie holds degrees from Morehouse College, Howard University and Atlanta University was an Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Savannah State University. He has recently retired from his teaching position Fayetteville State University. Dr. Kadalie is the author of the new book Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays (2019). He is also the founder of the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology.
Cindy Milstein
Cindy Milstein is the author/editor of Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief and Anarchism and Its Aspirations, co-author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism.
Cindy has been engaged in numerous collective projects aimed at creating autonomous spaces of resistance, reconstruction, and education, including the decentralized Institute for Anarchist Studies — focused on projects such as the Lexicon pamphlet series, IAS/AK Anarchist Interventions book series, and curating anarchist theory tracks; Station 40, an anarchist(ic) home and social center in San Francisco; Interference Archive in Brooklyn; Occupy Philly; and Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont. She also taught at the “anarchist summer school” called the Institute for Social Ecology, and has long been involved in community organizing and social/political movements from below.
Pearson Bolt
Pearson Bolt is a writer, community-organizer, professor, and PhD candidate who teaches and studies at Florida State University. Pearson has been active in hurricane relief efforts with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, organizes with FSU’s Graduate Assistants Union, does educational work with the Socialist Rifle Association and the Center for Participant Education, and frequently collaborates with the Democratic Socialists of America Libertarian-Socialist Caucus. In their spare time, Pearson writes obsessively and co-hosts Coffee with Comrades, a podcast discussing current events, theory, and action through a radical lens. Pearson’s debut poetry collection, Like Watching god Become Human, is out now via Rebel Hearts Publishing.
Shani Robinson
Shani Robinson was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She attended Tennessee State University, where she graduated with a double major in Psychology and African Studies in 2006. In 2007, she became a teacher through Teach For America. She served as a 1st and 5th grade teacher in the Atlanta Public Schools System, during which time she became entangled and wrongfuly convicted in the so-called Atlanta Schools Cheating Scandal. Following her years as a teacher, Shani has worked with children in the Department of Family Children Services and The Department of Juvenile Justice. Shani is the co-author of None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed , and the Criminalization of Educators and is currently a social justice advocate and mother.
Anna Simonton
Anna Simonton is an independent journalist based in Atlanta and is an editor for Scalawag magazine. Her work has been published by the Nation, In These Times, and AlterNet, among others. She is the co-author of None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed , and the Criminalization of Educators.
Jesse Benjamin
Jesse Benjamin is an Associate Professor at Kennesaw State University and a Board Member of the Walter Rodney Foundation (WRF), where he edits the peer-reviewed journals South and ATL, and is the Coeditor of Groundings, the WRF publication. He is also the primary organizer of the Walter Rodney Speaker Series and the annual Walter Rodney Symposium.
PAST SPEAKERS
William C. Anderson
William C. Anderson is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, and Pitchfork, among others. He is the co-author (with Zoe Samudzi) of the book As Black as Resistance, which describes how anti-Blackness shaped the contours and logics of European colonialism and its many legacies, to the extent that “Blackness” and “citizenship” are exclusive categories, and makes the case for a new program of self-defense and transformative politics for Black Americans, one rooted in an anarchistic framework that the authors liken to the Black experience itself.
Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill was, until moving to Atlanta in 2012, a member of the leadership council of Colorado AIM (American Indian Movement). A past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and UN delegate for the International Indian Treaty Council, he is a life member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and currently a member of the Council of Elders of the original Rainbow Coalition, founded by Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. Now retired, Churchill was professor of American Indian Studies and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies until 2005, when he became the focus of a major academic freedom case. Among his two dozen books are the award-winning Agents of Repression (1988, 2002), Fantasies of the Master Race (1992, 1998), Struggle for the Land (1993, 2002), and On the Justice of Roosting Chickens (2003), as well as The COINTELPRO Papers (1990, 2002), A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), Acts of Rebellion (2003), and Kill the Indian, Save the Man (2004).
His newest book, Wielding Words Like Weapons and a new edition of his classic Pacifism as Pathology are now available from PM Press.
Nani Ferreira-Mathews
Nani Ferreira-Mathews is a freelance journalist, independent musician, and activist currently living in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2011, she was an organizer during the most radical days of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City. As an independent scholar, she has an interest in communal decision-making practices and communication styles. She has studied squats, communes, and intentional communities in North America, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Between 2013-17, she was awarded the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Premiere Grant for music education, sound in public space, and independent music recording projects.
In 2013, Ferreira-Mathews participated in a popular free ten-day “birthright” trip to Israel offered by the Taglit-Birthright organization in an effort to explore and reconnect with her Jewish heritage. Her book, Birthright? Travelogue of and American Radical in Israel/Palestine is a day-to-day account of the programs, activities, and dating games featured on this guided tour—as well as the tour guides’ stubborn refusal to discuss or even acknowledge Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories—that reveals an agenda animated by racism, heterosexism, colonialism, and militaristic nationalism.
Drawing upon her experience as a person of both indigenous Hawaiian and Jewish heritage, Ferreira-Mathews interrogates the meaning of “birthright” within a settler-colonialist nation where national identity is so fundamentally invested in the systematic displacement of native peoples.
Mohammed El-Kurd
Mohammed El-Kurd is a nationally touring poet and writer from Jerusalem, Palestine. Being born on the 50th anniversary of the Nakba was an appropriate sign for someone who has gone on to channel so much of his country’s suffering and complexities into his art form. He writes in both Arabic and English. He considers writing in English extremely important because the narrative of the Palestinian people has been hijacked, shut down, and manipulated by the English-speaking press.
Author of Radical Blankets and upcoming book, RIFQA, El-Kurd writes about the intersections of the Palestinian struggle with resistance movements around the world, social norms and gender, islamophobia and the complexities of the Palestinian identity.
Cindy Milstein
Cindy Milstein is the author of Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief and Anarchism and Its Aspirations, co-author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism.
Cindy has been engaged in numerous collective projects aimed at creating autonomous spaces of resistance, reconstruction, and education, including the decentralized Institute for Anarchist Studies — focused on projects such as the Lexicon pamphlet series, IAS/AK Anarchist Interventions book series, and curating anarchist theory tracks; Station 40, an anarchist(ic) home and social center in San Francisco; Interference Archive in Brooklyn; Occupy Philly; and Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont. She also taught at the “anarchist summer school” called the Institute for Social Ecology, and has long been involved in community organizing and social/political movements from below.
Rozina Shiraz Gilani
Rozina Shiraz Gilani is a first-generation American dancer/choreographer and art curator whose work uplifts testimony. She is inspired by representations of identity, collective memory and most specifically post-trauma as represented in micro-histories and popular motif production. She is also on the steering committee of the local Jewish Voice for Peace Chapter and has organized extensively in Atlanta and internationally in the Middle East and Europe.
She will appear on the panel, “Standing in Solidarity with Palestine” at the 2018 Atlanta Radical Book Fair.
Dawud Anyabwile
Dawud Anyabwile is an Emmy Award Wining artist, illustrator and co-creator of the groundbreaking comic book series, Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline.
He and his brother Guy A. Sims, the writer and co-creator of Brotherman Comics, are pioneers of the contemporary Independent Black Comic Book movement. Selling over 750,000 copies in the early 1990’s without a major distributor and have currently released Book One of a three part graphic novel series entitled Brotherman: Revelation. Dawud Anyabwile has shared his artistic talent with major companies such as Cartoon Network, Turner Studios, NBA TV, Nickelodeon, Harper Collins Publishing, Scholastic and many others as a character designer, storyboard artist, illustrator and concept artist.
Dawud has received numerous awards and accolades throughout his career including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention in 2015, Glyph Comics Award for Best Artist 2016, the Key to Kansas City for Outstanding Service to Children and was nominated for the Will Eisner Award — Best Artist category at the San Diego Comic Con in 1992.
Dawud recenly illustrated the graphic novel adaptation of the New York times best selling novel, MONSTER, by the late Walter Dean Myers. Published by the world renowned publishing house, Harper Collins.
Dawud was born by the name of David Sims and raised in Philadelphia, PA where he developed his love for art, culture, science fiction and music appreciation. When Dawud is not working on his illustrations, he is busy volunteering, teaching art classes to young students, giving lectures and participating in community events.
Taryn Jordan
Taryn D. Jordan is a lifelong activist and a graduate student at Emory University seeking a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Her research interests lie in Blackness, queer theory, decolonial theory and affect theory. Taryn has invested her life in social justice work. She seeks to blend her political work and academic interests into a productive relationship where struggle and theory mutually inform one another creating the conditions for an intellectual and political spiral.
Sara
Sara is a lifelong organizer and revolutionary. They are currently with A World Without Police, a police abolitionist organization that is fighting to shut down the Atlanta City Detention Center.
Sara received their masters in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies and they currently enjoy teaching this subject at two southern universities. When Sara isn’t planning QTPOC anticapitalist takeover, they enjoy being outside, reading, baking, and working out.
Makeda Lewis
Makeda Lewis is an artist living in Atlanta, GA. Her work explores afrocentricity, gender dynamics, and Black womanhood.
Her first book, Avie’s Dreams (The Feminist Press, 2016), is part activity book, part surrealist poem, and takes an interactive and wildly introspective approach to afro-feminist self-discovery and girlhood. Avie’s Dreams is beautifully illustrated, but also tells a complex and challenging narrative of race, gender and sexuality, and body image. Interspersed with lyrics and quotes taken from contemporary Internet culture and modern poetry, the story investigates the trials and magic of a young black girl growing up in the world.
Tim Short
Timothy Short was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia. By painting figurative scenes using extreme lights and darks, Timothy explores dualities and meanings associated with social constructions. He often uses Afro-futuristic scenes of communal Black people in modes of resistance to contribute to radically disruptive political conversation.
Timothy obtained his BFA in Visual Art and Design along with a minor degree in African American Studies at Georgia State University. Among his many inspirations are Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Alex Gardner, Jordan Casteel, and Hieronymus Bosch. In 2015, Tim was the recipient of the Atlanta Artists Center’s Mary Brock Williams Award.
Akinyele Umoja
Akinyele Omowale Umoja is Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American studies at Georgia State University, where he teaches courses on the history of the civil rights and Black Power movements and other social movements. He has been a community activist for over 40 years and is a prominent organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
In his book, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Dr. Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. As the civil rights movement developed, armed self-defense and resistance became a significant means by which the descendants of enslaved Africans overturned fear and intimidation and developed different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.
Haroun Wakil
Haroun Wakil is an organizer and founder of Street Groomers, an organization that has grown out of Atlanta’s West End that is dedicated to preventing violence and stopping police brutality through self-organized community patrols and youth-outreach campaigns. Their mission is: “To clean up and take back the streets from those who terrorize our people and communities, including those drug dealers and those police officers who act as thugs targeting our people and communities of color.”
Haroun has also organized support for political prisoners and has been involved in the movement against displacement in Atlanta’s Peoplestown neighborhood.
Britt Bailey Dunn
Britt Bailey Dunn, born and raised in Atlanta, is a former organizer of MondoHomo and a current organizer with Southern Fried Queer Pride. At the time of this writing, they’ve just finished N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Series and are about to start it again. It’s that good.
Southern Fried Queer Pride (SFQP) is an Atlanta-based queer and trans, arts and advocacy organization and festival celebrating the vibrant communities of the Southern United States. Cooked in the oils of our forequeers of the Compton Cafeteria Riots, the Stonewall Riots, ACT UP, and the many radical uprisings of years past, SFQP holds close to the political identity of being queer. SFQP is arts and politically based and serves to provide an annual intersectional and radically inclusive festival, along with monthly programming.
2019 SPEAKERS
Eusi Kwayana
Eusi Kwayana is a revolutionary Pan-Africanist and independent socialist activist, teacher, and writer from Guyana. During the struggle for Guyanese independence, Kwayana was imprisoned by the British army in 1954. In 1956, he founded County High School (later renamed Republic Cooperative High School) in Buxton, Guyana. In 1964, he co-founded the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), an Afro-Guyanese socialist and anti-colonialist organization that became part of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in 1974. That organization was founded in part by Kwayana’s comrade Walter Rodney, who was assassinated in 1980.
Throughout his lifetime of social activism, Eusi Kwayana has advocated politics of direct democracy and working-class self-management. In his writings, he emphasizes that revolutionary change comes from among the ranks or ordinary people, through their own self-organization. His book The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics (1972) documents an early 1970s bauxite miners’ strike in Guyana during which striking workers organized themselves under the slogan “Every man is his own leader and we are leaderless” and directed their strike efforts through mass assemblies and direct-democratic councils.
Modibo Kadalie
During the early and middle 1970′s, Modibo Kadalie was an active member of several radical organizations. In the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), he served as a member of the Central Staff. He was Chair of the People’s Action Committee in Highland Park, Michigan. In the International African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), Kadalie was a founding member of the National Steering Committee. He chaired the Detroit local committee in 1972 and 1973, and then continued as a member of the expanded International Steering Committee as a representative from Atlanta, 1973-1975. Within the Sixth Pan-African Congress, he chaired the Southern Regional Organizing Committee from 1974-1975 and was also a member of both the North American Delegation and the North American Left Revolutionary Pan-African Caucus.
Modibo Kadalie holds degrees from Morehouse College, Howard University and Atlanta University was an Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Savannah State University. He has recently retired from his teaching position Fayetteville State University. Dr. Kadalie is the author of the new book Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays (2019). He is also the founder of the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology.
Cindy Milstein
Cindy Milstein is the author/editor of Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief and Anarchism and Its Aspirations, co-author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism.
Cindy has been engaged in numerous collective projects aimed at creating autonomous spaces of resistance, reconstruction, and education, including the decentralized Institute for Anarchist Studies — focused on projects such as the Lexicon pamphlet series, IAS/AK Anarchist Interventions book series, and curating anarchist theory tracks; Station 40, an anarchist(ic) home and social center in San Francisco; Interference Archive in Brooklyn; Occupy Philly; and Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont. She also taught at the “anarchist summer school” called the Institute for Social Ecology, and has long been involved in community organizing and social/political movements from below.
Pearson Bolt
Pearson Bolt is a writer, community-organizer, professor, and PhD candidate who teaches and studies at Florida State University. Pearson has been active in hurricane relief efforts with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, organizes with FSU’s Graduate Assistants Union, does educational work with the Socialist Rifle Association and the Center for Participant Education, and frequently collaborates with the Democratic Socialists of America Libertarian-Socialist Caucus. In their spare time, Pearson writes obsessively and co-hosts Coffee with Comrades, a podcast discussing current events, theory, and action through a radical lens. Pearson’s debut poetry collection, Like Watching god Become Human, is out now via Rebel Hearts Publishing.
Shani Robinson
Shani Robinson was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She attended Tennessee State University, where she graduated with a double major in Psychology and African Studies in 2006. In 2007, she became a teacher through Teach For America. She served as a 1st and 5th grade teacher in the Atlanta Public Schools System, during which time she became entangled and wrongfuly convicted in the so-called Atlanta Schools Cheating Scandal. Following her years as a teacher, Shani has worked with children in the Department of Family Children Services and The Department of Juvenile Justice. Shani is the co-author of None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed , and the Criminalization of Educators and is currently a social justice advocate and mother.
Anna Simonton
Anna Simonton is an independent journalist based in Atlanta and is an editor for Scalawag magazine. Her work has been published by the Nation, In These Times, and AlterNet, among others. She is the co-author of None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed , and the Criminalization of Educators.
Jesse Benjamin
Jesse Benjamin is an Associate Professor at Kennesaw State University and a Board Member of the Walter Rodney Foundation (WRF), where he edits the peer-reviewed journals South and ATL, and is the Coeditor of Groundings, the WRF publication. He is also the primary organizer of the Walter Rodney Speaker Series and the annual Walter Rodney Symposium.
PAST SPEAKERS
William C. Anderson
William C. Anderson is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, and Pitchfork, among others. He is the co-author (with Zoe Samudzi) of the book As Black as Resistance, which describes how anti-Blackness shaped the contours and logics of European colonialism and its many legacies, to the extent that “Blackness” and “citizenship” are exclusive categories, and makes the case for a new program of self-defense and transformative politics for Black Americans, one rooted in an anarchistic framework that the authors liken to the Black experience itself.
Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill was, until moving to Atlanta in 2012, a member of the leadership council of Colorado AIM (American Indian Movement). A past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and UN delegate for the International Indian Treaty Council, he is a life member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and currently a member of the Council of Elders of the original Rainbow Coalition, founded by Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. Now retired, Churchill was professor of American Indian Studies and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies until 2005, when he became the focus of a major academic freedom case. Among his two dozen books are the award-winning Agents of Repression (1988, 2002), Fantasies of the Master Race (1992, 1998), Struggle for the Land (1993, 2002), and On the Justice of Roosting Chickens (2003), as well as The COINTELPRO Papers (1990, 2002), A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), Acts of Rebellion (2003), and Kill the Indian, Save the Man (2004).
His newest book, Wielding Words Like Weapons and a new edition of his classic Pacifism as Pathology are now available from PM Press.
Nani Ferreira-Mathews
Nani Ferreira-Mathews is a freelance journalist, independent musician, and activist currently living in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2011, she was an organizer during the most radical days of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City. As an independent scholar, she has an interest in communal decision-making practices and communication styles. She has studied squats, communes, and intentional communities in North America, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Between 2013-17, she was awarded the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Premiere Grant for music education, sound in public space, and independent music recording projects.
In 2013, Ferreira-Mathews participated in a popular free ten-day “birthright” trip to Israel offered by the Taglit-Birthright organization in an effort to explore and reconnect with her Jewish heritage. Her book, Birthright? Travelogue of and American Radical in Israel/Palestine is a day-to-day account of the programs, activities, and dating games featured on this guided tour—as well as the tour guides’ stubborn refusal to discuss or even acknowledge Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories—that reveals an agenda animated by racism, heterosexism, colonialism, and militaristic nationalism.
Drawing upon her experience as a person of both indigenous Hawaiian and Jewish heritage, Ferreira-Mathews interrogates the meaning of “birthright” within a settler-colonialist nation where national identity is so fundamentally invested in the systematic displacement of native peoples.
Mohammed El-Kurd
Mohammed El-Kurd is a nationally touring poet and writer from Jerusalem, Palestine. Being born on the 50th anniversary of the Nakba was an appropriate sign for someone who has gone on to channel so much of his country’s suffering and complexities into his art form. He writes in both Arabic and English. He considers writing in English extremely important because the narrative of the Palestinian people has been hijacked, shut down, and manipulated by the English-speaking press.
Author of Radical Blankets and upcoming book, RIFQA, El-Kurd writes about the intersections of the Palestinian struggle with resistance movements around the world, social norms and gender, islamophobia and the complexities of the Palestinian identity.
Cindy Milstein
Cindy Milstein is the author of Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief and Anarchism and Its Aspirations, co-author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism.
Cindy has been engaged in numerous collective projects aimed at creating autonomous spaces of resistance, reconstruction, and education, including the decentralized Institute for Anarchist Studies — focused on projects such as the Lexicon pamphlet series, IAS/AK Anarchist Interventions book series, and curating anarchist theory tracks; Station 40, an anarchist(ic) home and social center in San Francisco; Interference Archive in Brooklyn; Occupy Philly; and Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont. She also taught at the “anarchist summer school” called the Institute for Social Ecology, and has long been involved in community organizing and social/political movements from below.
Rozina Shiraz Gilani
Rozina Shiraz Gilani is a first-generation American dancer/choreographer and art curator whose work uplifts testimony. She is inspired by representations of identity, collective memory and most specifically post-trauma as represented in micro-histories and popular motif production. She is also on the steering committee of the local Jewish Voice for Peace Chapter and has organized extensively in Atlanta and internationally in the Middle East and Europe.
She will appear on the panel, “Standing in Solidarity with Palestine” at the 2018 Atlanta Radical Book Fair.
Dawud Anyabwile
Dawud Anyabwile is an Emmy Award Wining artist, illustrator and co-creator of the groundbreaking comic book series, Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline.
He and his brother Guy A. Sims, the writer and co-creator of Brotherman Comics, are pioneers of the contemporary Independent Black Comic Book movement. Selling over 750,000 copies in the early 1990’s without a major distributor and have currently released Book One of a three part graphic novel series entitled Brotherman: Revelation. Dawud Anyabwile has shared his artistic talent with major companies such as Cartoon Network, Turner Studios, NBA TV, Nickelodeon, Harper Collins Publishing, Scholastic and many others as a character designer, storyboard artist, illustrator and concept artist.
Dawud has received numerous awards and accolades throughout his career including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention in 2015, Glyph Comics Award for Best Artist 2016, the Key to Kansas City for Outstanding Service to Children and was nominated for the Will Eisner Award — Best Artist category at the San Diego Comic Con in 1992.
Dawud recenly illustrated the graphic novel adaptation of the New York times best selling novel, MONSTER, by the late Walter Dean Myers. Published by the world renowned publishing house, Harper Collins.
Dawud was born by the name of David Sims and raised in Philadelphia, PA where he developed his love for art, culture, science fiction and music appreciation. When Dawud is not working on his illustrations, he is busy volunteering, teaching art classes to young students, giving lectures and participating in community events.
Taryn Jordan
Taryn D. Jordan is a lifelong activist and a graduate student at Emory University seeking a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Her research interests lie in Blackness, queer theory, decolonial theory and affect theory. Taryn has invested her life in social justice work. She seeks to blend her political work and academic interests into a productive relationship where struggle and theory mutually inform one another creating the conditions for an intellectual and political spiral.
Sara Khaled
Sara Khaled is a lifelong organizer and revolutionary. They are currently with A World Without Police, a police abolitionist organization that is fighting to shut down the Atlanta City Detention Center.
Sara received their masters in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies and they currently enjoy teaching this subject at two southern universities. When Sara isn’t planning QTPOC anticapitalist takeover, they enjoy being outside, reading, baking, and working out.
Makeda Lewis
Makeda Lewis is an artist living in Atlanta, GA. Her work explores afrocentricity, gender dynamics, and Black womanhood.
Her first book, Avie’s Dreams (The Feminist Press, 2016), is part activity book, part surrealist poem, and takes an interactive and wildly introspective approach to afro-feminist self-discovery and girlhood. Avie’s Dreams is beautifully illustrated, but also tells a complex and challenging narrative of race, gender and sexuality, and body image. Interspersed with lyrics and quotes taken from contemporary Internet culture and modern poetry, the story investigates the trials and magic of a young black girl growing up in the world.
Tim Short
Timothy Short was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia. By painting figurative scenes using extreme lights and darks, Timothy explores dualities and meanings associated with social constructions. He often uses Afro-futuristic scenes of communal Black people in modes of resistance to contribute to radically disruptive political conversation.
Timothy obtained his BFA in Visual Art and Design along with a minor degree in African American Studies at Georgia State University. Among his many inspirations are Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Alex Gardner, Jordan Casteel, and Hieronymus Bosch. In 2015, Tim was the recipient of the Atlanta Artists Center’s Mary Brock Williams Award.
Akinyele Umoja
Akinyele Omowale Umoja is Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American studies at Georgia State University, where he teaches courses on the history of the civil rights and Black Power movements and other social movements. He has been a community activist for over 40 years and is a prominent organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
In his book, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Dr. Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. As the civil rights movement developed, armed self-defense and resistance became a significant means by which the descendants of enslaved Africans overturned fear and intimidation and developed different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.
Haroun Wakil
Haroun Wakil is an organizer and founder of Street Groomers, an organization that has grown out of Atlanta’s West End that is dedicated to preventing violence and stopping police brutality through self-organized community patrols and youth-outreach campaigns. Their mission is: “To clean up and take back the streets from those who terrorize our people and communities, including those drug dealers and those police officers who act as thugs targeting our people and communities of color.”
Haroun has also organized support for political prisoners and has been involved in the movement against displacement in Atlanta’s Peoplestown neighborhood.
Britt Bailey Dunn
Britt Bailey Dunn, born and raised in Atlanta, is a former organizer of MondoHomo and a current organizer with Southern Fried Queer Pride. At the time of this writing, they’ve just finished N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Series and are about to start it again. It’s that good.
Southern Fried Queer Pride (SFQP) is an Atlanta-based queer and trans, arts and advocacy organization and festival celebrating the vibrant communities of the Southern United States. Cooked in the oils of our forequeers of the Compton Cafeteria Riots, the Stonewall Riots, ACT UP, and the many radical uprisings of years past, SFQP holds close to the political identity of being queer. SFQP is arts and politically based and serves to provide an annual intersectional and radically inclusive festival, along with monthly programming.
ATLANTA RADICAL BOOK FAIR 