// Posts by Nikesha Elise Williams
Finding the Freedom to Love Through Faith
While faith is not often considered a hallmark of progressive values, you can be a person of faith and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. As historian Blair Imani noted in her TED Talk, these identities are neither mutually exclusive nor do they need to be reconciled. However, hardline readings of religious texts – be…
Art is at the Heart of Disability Justice
An estimated 7.5% of the adult population in the United States is now living with long COVID, the long-term or chronic effects of a COVID infection, or reinfection, in children and adults. Artist, teacher, and HIV organizer Pato Hebert is one of them. In January, Hebert spoke with Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, who lives with both HIV…
Changing the Conversation Around Reproductive Justice
“Reproductive justice” was first coined in 1994 by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice and defined in 1997 by Sister Song (a formal outgrowth of that group) as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” To…
Setting Boundaries in Mission Driven Work
The Changemaker Authors Cohort, a partnership with the Unicorn Authors Club, is a yearlong intensive coaching program supporting full-time movement activists and social justice practitioners to complete books that create deep, durable narrative change, restructuring the way people feel, think, and respond to the world. This interview series features participants in the inaugural cohort. Shannon…
SxSW 2023: A Place for Narrative to Thrive
Two weeks ago, I descended into Austin, Texas for week two of the SxSW conference and festival. It’s a real-life gathering of folks who embody the saying “Revenge of the Nerds.” Politicians and thought leaders, activists and entrepreneurs, tech heads and gamers, cinephiles, bibliophiles and music aficionados; all who arrived were welcome. With my interactive…
Fleshing Out History
Throughout American history, efforts to bring the stories and lived experiences of people of color into the broader American narrative have been met with fierce resistance. When SNCC and a broad group of educators organized to make Black studies a feature of the curriculum, states sought to ban — and defund — the teaching and…
Creating Systems of Support
Silky Shah is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. An organizer for more than twenty years, Silky has worked on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice. Her book project contends that the prison industrial…
We Have Always Existed
Emily Ramirez is a queer Dominican woman, born and raised in NYCHA housing in Brooklyn, and is currently contracting with the United Nations as a social media specialist. She holds a Bachelor’s in creative writing and comparative literature, and has published works in Huizache, Girls Write Now: Two Decades of True Stories From Young Female…
Living with Desire & Bipolar Disorder
Adam Nyang is a Gambian who recently completed her Bachelor’s degree in English Studies. She has always been passionate about storytelling and reading, and recently published a romance novel called Betting on Love under the pen-name Kani Sey with Love Africa Press. Her short story, Faroh, was longlisted for the 2021 K & L Prize….
“Money is Medicine”
Back in June, I moderated a panel at Alight, Align, Arise, the inaugural conference on reparations hosted by Decolonizing Wealth. The panel focused on the narrative history of reparations, a history that began well before the end of the Civil War as keynote speaker and author Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed during his opening night fireside chat…