Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet" who dedicated her life and talents to confronting different forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions" among "those who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children."
A spill occurs when the contents of something, usually in liquid form, are emptied out onto a surface, person or clothes, often unintentionally.
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was an activist feminist press, closely related to the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), that was started in 1980 by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, poet Audre Lorde. Beverly Smith and Barbara Smith, and their associate Demita Frazier, had together cofounded the Combahee River Collective (CRC). The Kitchen Table became inactive soon after Audre Lorde's death in 1992. The motivation for starting a press run by and for women of color was that "as feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published, except at the mercy or whim of others, whether in the context of alternative or commercial publishing, since both are white-dominated."
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective
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
Saidiya Hartman is an American academic and writer focusing on African-American studies. She is currently a university professor at Columbia University in their English department. Her work focuses on African-American literature, cultural history, photography and ethics, and the intersections of law and literature.
The Debut Prize — is an independent literary prize for young authors who write in Russian. It was established by Andrei Skoch with the support of the Generation International Foundation in 2000.
Hortense J. Spillers is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.
Hip hop feminism is a sub-set of black feminism that centers on intersectional subject positions involving race and gender in a way that acknowledges the contradictions in being a black feminist, such as black women's enjoyment in hip hop music and culture, rather than simply focusing on the victimization of black women in hip hop culture due to interlocking systems of oppressions involving race, class, and gender.
A miscellany is a collection of various pieces of writing by different authors. Meaning a mixture, medley, or assortment, a miscellany can include pieces on many subjects and in a variety of different forms. In contrast to anthologies, whose aim is to give a selective and canonical view of literature, miscellanies were produced for the entertainment of a contemporary audience and so instead emphasise collectiveness and popularity. Laura Mandell and Rita Raley state:
This last distinction is quite often visible in the basic categorical differences between anthologies on the one hand, and all other types of collections on the other, for it is in the one that we read poems of excellence, the "best of English poetry," and it is in the other that we read poems of interest. Out of the differences between a principle of selection and a principle of collection, then, comes a difference in aesthetic value, which is precisely what is at issue in the debates over the "proper" material for inclusion into the canon.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish poet and essayist who writes in both Irish and English.
Alexis De Veaux is an American writer and illustrator. She chaired the Department of Women's Studies, at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Cheryll Y. Greene was an American editor and scholar. Her work focused on history, culture, and social justice issues. She served as executive editor of Essence magazine and was involved in major projects about the life and times of Malcolm X.
The Revival Women and the Word is a 2016 documentary film directed by Sekiya Dorsett, a queer filmmaker who works to give voice to issues of equality. This documentary chronicles a US tour group of black lesbian poets and musicians who are traveling performing making history as queer women of color. Their journey is to bring together their community and include interviews from leading black feminist and queer thinkers including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Nikki Finney, and Alexis De Veaux. This documentary tackles themes such as gender, race, and sexuality. This film works to represent community and provide a special insight to the experience of queer women of color performers. Additionally, this film works to empower and raise the voices of the marginalized.
Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement in the United States, including the transatlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality of African Americans; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts.
Deirdre OsborneHon. FRSL is an Australian-born academic, who is Professor of Literature and Drama in English. She teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London and is Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Co-ordinator for the School of Arts and Humanities. She co-founded the MA degree in Black British Writing. In 2022, Osborne was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature for her "her contribution to the advancement of literature in the UK".
Fred Moten is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside; he previously taught at Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Iowa. His scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study which was co-authored with Stefano Harney, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and The Universal Machine. He has published numerous poetry collections, including The Little Edges, The Feel Trio, B Jenkins, and Hughson’s Tavern. In 2020, Moten was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for "[c]reating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life."
Vanessa K. Valdés is an author, educator, writer, editor, historian, and associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the City College of New York. She is a Puerto Rican of African descent. She is the author of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Schomburg was one of the founding fathers of Black History in North America, and the father of the Global African Diaspora. She has also written Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas. In Oshun's Daughters she examines African Diasporic sense of womanhood, examining novels, poems, etc., written by Diaspora women from the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Writings that show how these women use traditional Yoruba religion as alternative models for their womanhood differing from western concepts of being a woman.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an American writer, independent scholar, poet, activist and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. Gumbs advocates for other POC queer women and is commonly known as a “Black Feminist love evangelist,” but she also describes herself as a "Queer Black Troublemaker." In her experimental triptych, Gumbs explores the implications of humanity’s struggle with ecological disruption and Black feminist theory and refusals.
The Peculiar Kind is an American web docu-series produced by Alexis Casson and Mursi Haynes. The series features interviews with lesbian and queer women of color living in Brooklyn, New York. The series ran for two season, and the first episode premiered online in February 2012. The final episode aired in November 2013. The Peculiar Kind was recommended by outlets such as HuffPost, Bitch, and AfterEllen.
