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Kamaria Muntu | |
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| Website | www.femficatio.com |
Kamaria S. Muntu (born Tracey De Sandra Martin on November 1) is a Black Feminist poet, writer and arts activist. She is also Editor and Founder of Femficatio Literary Magazine.
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Kamaria Muntu | |
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| Website | www.femficatio.com |
Kamaria S. Muntu (born Tracey De Sandra Martin on November 1) is a Black Feminist poet, writer and arts activist. She is also Editor and Founder of Femficatio Literary Magazine.
She was born in Baltimore, Maryland the daughter of an elementary school teacher, who later became a Master Teacher, and a bus driver who was among the first Black men to integrate the Baltimore Transit Company. She is the granddaughter of Elizabeth Mae Kennedy. When she was a month old, her parents divorced and she and her mother lived with her grandparents. Her mother later remarried and she had a turbulent upbringing. While attending Milford Mill Senior High school now Milford Mill Academy in Baltimore she played Mrs. Chumley in a production of Harvey , the wife to Dr. Chumley played by the now celebrity Ira Glass, of "This American Life". Muntu was a theater major at university.
Muntu is best known for being a contributor to the anthology Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. She is General Editor of Sinister Guru (formerly Femficatio) the cultural and literary magazine of Coal and Femficatio Publishing.
Muntu is primarily a poet, with few publications in other genres. She was first published in Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology for the African American Literary Tradition for which her work was highly critically praised, the editors hailing Muntu as a "rising star in neo-aesthetic literary circles". Poems included were "Lymphoma" and "Of Women and Spirit". Muntu has been heavily anthologized, appearing in literary journals and anthologies in the USA and the UK.
Muntu has read her poetry at the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta with such notables as Sonia Sanchez and Mari Evans.
Kamaria Muntu's work has also been featured in Fertile Ground - Memories & Visions: "A Call to End the Oppression of Women" (1996) with the Atlanta Committee for Black Liberation; the anthology A Lime Jewel (2010); Journal of Pan African Studies (2010); the poetry collection This Peace of Place (2012); and the anthology Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander (2014).
Muntu is General Editor of Sinister Guru (formerly Femficatio Culture), the online culture and literary magazine of Coal and Femficatio Publishing. According to the website of the journal, the term Femficatio was coined by Philosophy Editor Malkia Charlee NoCry. Femficatio/Sinister Guru has Published the art of Aldo Tambellini, Helene Ruiz and Sam Grisham; has interviewed the artist and actor Michael Marisi Ornstein; has published award winning poets Askia M. Toure and Afaa M. Weaver, as well as the writing of Pamela Plummer, Margie Shaheed, Pavel Rogov, Nana Nyarko Boateng and CC Ashagra; and musician Lilli Lewis, among others.
Muntu has worked with organisations such as Amnesty International. She has spearheaded many initiatives for at-risk youth and women in the arts throughout Georgia, USA. From her experience as an activist,
Noted for her dedication to women's equality, she was one of the principal writers (among them Ajamu Baraka, who won the United Nations Ambassador Kofi Annan award as a death penalty activist) of a paper entitled "A Call to End the Oppression of Women" published in Fertile Ground by Kalamu Ya Salaam and Keshia Brown (Renagade Press).
In 2018, Kamaria Muntu's chapter, "Understanding the macroaggressions underscoring the invisibility of Black female victims of police violence within Black Lives Matter protests" was published in the book "Intersectionality in Social Work: Activism and Practice in Context" edited by Suryia Nayak and Rachel Robbins. [1]
Triple oppression, also called double jeopardy, Jane Crow, or triple exploitation, is a theory developed by black socialists in the United States, such as Claudia Jones. The theory states that a connection exists between various types of oppression, specifically classism, racism, and sexism. It hypothesizes that all three types of oppression need to be overcome at once.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer. Beginning in 1845, she was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States.
Womanism is a term originating from the work of African American author Alice Walker in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, denoting a movement within feminism, primarily championed by Black feminists. Walker coined the term "womanist" in the short story Coming Apart in 1979. Her initial use of the term evolved to envelop a spectrum of issues and perspectives facing black women and others.
Margaret Sloan-Hunter was a Black feminist, lesbian, civil rights advocate, and one of the early editors of Ms. magazine.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Lorraine Bethel is an African-American lesbian feminist poet and author.
Black feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Black feminism philosophy centers on the idea that "Black women are inherently valuable, that liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's but because of our need as human persons for autonomy."
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.
Frances M. Beal, also known as Fran Beal, is a Black feminist and a peace and justice political activist. Her focus has predominantly been regarding women's rights, racial justice, anti-war and peace work, as well as international solidarity. Beal was a founding member of the SNCC Black Women's Liberation Committee, which later evolved into the Third World Women's Alliance. She is most widely known for her publication, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female", which theorizes the intersection of oppression between race, class, and gender. Beal currently lives in Oakland, California.
Sinister Wisdom is an American lesbian literary, theory, and art journal published quarterly in Berkeley, California. Started in 1976 by Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Ellenberger (Desmoines) in Charlotte, North Carolina, it is the longest established lesbian journal, with 128 issues as of 2023. Each journal covers topics pertaining to the lesbian experience including creative writing, poetry, literary criticism and feminist theory. Sinister Wisdom accepts submissions from novice to accredited writers and has featured the works of writers and artists such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. The journal has pioneered female publishing, working with female operated publishing companies such as Whole Women Press and Iowa City Women's Press. Sapphic Classics, a partnership between Sinister Wisdom and A Midsummer Night's Press, reprints classic lesbian works for contemporary audiences.
Cheryl L. Clarke is an American lesbian poet, essayist, educator and a Black feminist community activist who continues to dedicate her life to the recognition and advancement of Black and Queer people. Her scholarship focuses on African-American women's literature, black lesbian feminism, and the Black Arts Movement in the United States. For over 40 years, Cheryl Clarke worked at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and maintains a teaching affiliation with the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, though retired. In addition, Clarke serves on the board of the Newark Pride Alliance. She currently lives in Hobart, New York, the Book Village of the Catskills, after having spent much of her life in New Jersey. With her life partner, Barbara Balliet, she is co-owner of Bleinheim Hill Books, a new, used, and rare bookstore in Hobart. Actively involved in her community, Clarke along with her sister Breena Clarke, a novelist, organizes the Hobart Festival of Women Writers each September
Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition is a compilation of literary and cultural works that originated from call and response patterns in African and African-American cultural traditions. The 1997 anthology includes works representing the centuries-long emergence of this distinctly Black literary and cultural aesthetic in fiction, poetry, drama, essays, sermons, speeches, criticism, journals, and song lyrics from spirituals to rap. Writings ranging from Queen Latifah to Phyllis Wheatley and LeRoi Jones are included within this volume. This anthology asserts that these various artistic forms comprise a Black aesthetic.
The Combahee River Collective (CRC) was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1974 to 1980. The Collective argued that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement were not addressing their particular needs as Black women and more specifically as Black lesbians. Racism was present in the mainstream feminist movement, while Delaney and Manditch-Prottas argue that much of the Civil Rights Movement had a sexist and homophobic reputation.
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was an American essayist, poet, academic, and political activist.
"Africana womanism" is a term coined in the late 1980s by Clenora Hudson-Weems, intended as an ideology applicable to all women of African descent. It is grounded in African culture and Afrocentrism and focuses on the experiences, struggles, needs, and desires of Africana women of the African diaspora. It distinguishes itself from feminism, or Alice Walker's womanism. Africana womanism pays more attention to and focuses more on the realities and the injustices in society in regard to race.
Samiya A. Bashir is a queer American artist, poet, and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently the June Jordan visiting professor at Columbia University of New York. Bashir is the first black woman recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature. She was also the third black woman to serve as tenured professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment is a 1990 book by Patricia Hill Collins.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches is a collection of essential essays and speeches written by Audre Lorde, a writer who focuses on the particulars of her identity: Black woman, lesbian, poet, activist, cancer survivor, mother, and feminist. This collection, now considered a classic volume of Lorde's most influential works of non-fiction prose, has had a groundbreaking impact in the development of contemporary feminist theories. In fifteen essays and speeches dating from 1976 to 1984, Lorde explores the complexities of intersectional identity, while explicitly drawing from her personal experiences of oppression to include sexism, heterosexism, racism, homophobia, classism, and ageism. The book examines a broad range of topics, including love, self-love, war, imperialism, police brutality, coalition building, violence against women, Black feminism, and movements towards equality that recognize and embrace differences as a vehicle for change. With meditative conscious reasoning, Lorde explores her misgivings for the widespread marginalization deeply-rooted in the United States' white patriarchal system, all the while, offering messages of hope. The essays in this landmark collection are extensively taught and have become a widespread area of academic analysis. Lorde's philosophical reasoning that recognizes oppressions as complex and interlocking designates her work as a significant contribution to critical social theory.
Patricia Alveda Liggins Hill was an American college professor. She was one of the first three Black professors hired by the University of San Francisco (USF), in 1970. She became the first director of the Ethnic Studies program, and taught at USF until her retirement in 2015. Hill was general editor of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1997).