Black Feminist Writers and Palestine

On Sunday, October 22nd at 5:30 PM ET/2:30 PM PT, Black Women Radicals hosted the online event, “Black Feminist Writers and Palestine."
This online event focused on the importance of the Black feminist literary and political canon and the mandate of Black feminist commitments to a free Palestine.
Moreover, we will cite, discuss, and interrogate the long, extensive, and unwavering tradition of Black feminist educators, poets, writers, organizers, and more who have committed to being in solidarity with Palestine.
Featuring remarks from: Clarissa Brooks, Angela Y. Davis, Breya Johnson, Briona Simone Jones, and Jaimee A. Swift
For more information about the Black Feminist Tradition in Solidarity with Palestine, check out Black Women Radicals Reading List, “Solidarity with Palestine: A Black Feminist Mandate: www.blackwomen...
About the speakers:
Clarissa Brooks is an Atlanta-based reporter, journalist, and cultural worker. She was a 2022 Queer Art Literature fellow and a 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 listee. Brooks fixes a Black queer feminist lens to the vital cultural work she produces for publications like New York Magazine, The Cut, Rolling Stone, Oxford American and NPR. She is currently the Strategic Partnerships Editor at Reckon News and Mass Engagement table member of the Movement for Black Lives.
Angela Y. Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator - both at the university level and in the larger public sphere - has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse University the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. Most recently she spent fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness - an interdisciplinary Ph.D program - and of Feminist Studies. Davis is the author of ten books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Her books include Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete?, and two books of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom, and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her most recent books include a re-issue of Angela Davis: An Autobiography and Abolition. Feminism. Now., with co-authors Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall everly Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center (1981) and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College. For many years she was a visiting professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies where she taught graduate courses in Women’s Studies.Guy-Sheftall has published a number of texts within African American and Women’s Studies which have been noted as seminal works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Doubleday, 1980), which she coedited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Carlson, 1991); Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995); an anthology she co-edited with Rudolph Byrd entitled Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Indiana University Press, 2001); and more.
Breya Johnson is a cultural worker and freelance writer living in the DMV. Her work looks at modes of disposability, reproductive justice, radical love/care ethics, and abolition. She’s an abortion doula and RJ trainer. She currently runs the IG blog “@blackreadingtoheal”
Briona Simone Jones is Assistant Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is a multi-award-winning writer, scholar, and editor of Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (The New Press, 2021), the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian Thought to date.
Jaimee A. Swift is the executive director and founder of Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender expansive people's radical activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora. She is also the creator and founder of The School for Black Feminist Politics (SBFP), the Black feminist political education arm of Black Women Radicals. She is the co-author, with Joseph R. Fitzgerald, of the forthcoming biography of Black feminist icon Barbara Smith.