Mwende Katwiwa

Last updated

Mwende Katwiwa, who performs under the name FreeQuency, is a Kenyan-American slam poet, community organizer, and activist. [1] [2] Their poems address issues of identity, emotion, racism, colonialism, and police brutality in the United States. They live in New Orleans. [3]

Contents

Katwiwa graduated from Tulane University in 2014. [4] [5] They self-published a book of poetry, Becoming//Black, in 2015. They have also been touring the U.S. to perform spoken word poems since 2011. [3] They gave a TED Talk in 2017 called "Black life at the intersection of birth and death." [1] They work for Women with a Vision, a nonprofit based in New Orleans. [5] They also work with slam poetry and open mic organizations in New Orleans. [3]

They won the 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam. [6] At the poetry slam, Katwiwa performed "Dear White People" and "The Gospel of Colonization." [7] Katwiwa also placed at both the 2015 and 2016 Individual World Poetry Slam. [3]

Mwende Katwiwa is active in the Black Lives Matter movement, reproductive rights and abortion rights activism, and LGBTQ+ advocacy. [8] Katwiwa is part of the New Orleans chapter of BYP100 and is involved with youth organizing. [9] [10] For example, they helped organize a protest march in 2014 regarding the killing of Michael Brown by police. [11] Although they were primarily involved with in-person organizing, they also used the social media site Tumblr to promote the protest. [12]

Katwiwa is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns. [5]

Bibliography

References

  1. 1 2 Goughnor, Kara (January 28, 2018). "An Interview with Poet "FreeQuency"". The Insider. University of Pittsburgh.
  2. Alonso Castro 2019, p. 1.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Samuels, Diana (November 13, 2016). "Poetry off the Page; New Orleans artist intertwines spoken word, activism". The Times-Picayune. p. D01.
  4. Johnson, Fawn; Hollander, Catherine (July 13, 2012). "Washington, D.C.: Still a Tough Town for the Ladies". The Atlantic.
  5. 1 2 3 McTighe, Laura (June 2020). "Theory on the Ground: Ethnography, Religio-Racial Study, and the Spiritual Work of Building Otherwise". Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 88 (2). Oxford University Press: 409. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfaa014.
  6. "Slam poet champion to perform Nov. 8". Nebraska Today. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. November 1, 2019.
  7. Alonso Castro 2019, p. 8.
  8. Wilkerson, Emily (November 18, 2020). "A Roadmap for Understanding". Tulane University School of Liberal Arts. Tulane University.
  9. Oliviero, Katie (2018). Vulnerability Politics: The Uses and Abuses of Precarity in Political Debate. NYU Press. pp. 276–277. ISBN   9781479838677.
  10. Hogan, Wesley C. (2019). "The Movement for Black Lives". On the Freedom Side : How Five Decades of Youth Activists Have Remixed American History. JSTOR: Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. p. 134. ISBN   9781469652474.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
  11. McTighe, Laura (June 2020). "Theory on the Ground: Ethnography, Religio-Racial Study, and the Spiritual Work of Building Otherwise". Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 88 (2). Oxford University Press: 428–429. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfaa014.
  12. Safronova, Valeriya (December 19, 2014). "Millennials and the Age of Tumblr Activism". New York Times.