// Posts by Nikesha Elise Williams
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….
Busting the “Post-Patriarchy” Myth
Ellen Bravo is a long-time activist and author who’s spent decades organizing among low-wage women from a social justice feminist framework. She’s the Co-Founder of Family Values At Work, a network of state coalitions that advocate for paid sick days and paid family medical leave. Previously, Ellen served as the longtime director of 9to5. She’s…
Mapping the Beaches of Black America
The Changemaker Authors Cohort, a partnership with the Unicorn Authors Club, is a new, 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….
Wielding Grief to Enact Change
Malkia Devich Cyril, is a writer, public speaker and award winning activist on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation and collective grief. Their book, Radical Loss: Black Grief Can Change the World, combines personal storytelling and political essays to reframe grief as a powerful driver for movements, rather than a private experience. The…
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…