Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan, Founder
THE FEMALE FIGHTER, Fall 2018
Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan is a writer, a scholar, and an activist. She is a Professor at the City College of New York, where she founded the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative, a global initiative that draws on in-depth research to inform movement-building around the impact of sexual violence on women's political identities. As a key part of this initiative Dr. Gowrinathan created Beyond Identity: A Gendered Platform for Scholar-Activists, a program that seeks to train immigrants and students of color in identity-driven research, political writing, and activism anchored in a thoughtful analysis of structural violence. She has been an analyst and policy consultant on women's political voice and participation in violence in South Asia for the International Crisis Group, The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, UN Women, and the Asian Development Bank. She is also currently a Senior Scholar at the Center for Political Conflict, Gender, and People's Rights at the University of California, Berkeley. She provides expert analysis for CNN, MSNBC, AL Jazeera, and the BBC and has been published in Harper's Magazine, Freeman's Journal, and Guernica Magazine among others. Dr. Gowrinathan is the creator of the Female Fighter Series at Guernica Magazine and the Publisher of Adi, a new literary journal to rehumanize policy. Her work, and writings, can be found at www.deviarchy.com. Her forthcoming book, Radicalizing Her, examines the complex politics of the female fighter (Beacon 2020).
Dr. Anjuli Raza-Kolb
LIVING A FEMINIST LIFE/WRITING A FEMINIST STORY, Fall 2017
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is Assistant Professor of English at Williams College, where she teaches colonial and postcolonial literature and theory. She received her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2014. She is the first recipient of the Edward W. Said fellowship at Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities (2017), and was visiting expert scholar at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Engagement, City College New York in the fall of 2017. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Discourse, The Boston Review, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Triple Canopy, The Bennington Review, Syndicate Lit, V21, and other venues. She is writing a scholarly book about Islam and the epidemic imaginary in colonial letters, and a collection of poems called Janaab-e Shikva after the Pakistani poet Iqbal.
Michael Archer
NON-FICTION PUBLISHING, 2017-2019
Michael Archer is founder of Guernica Magazine, where he was editor-in-chief from 2004 through 2016, and currently serves as chief editorial advisor. He's the recipient of the 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing, given to "a magazine editor whose high literary standards have contributed significantly to the excellence of the publication he or she edits." His fiction, nonfiction, and commentary have appeared in numerous online and print publication
Dr. Kate Cronin-Furman
HELPING OR HURTING?: HUMAN RIGHTS NARRATIVES IN QUESTION,Fall 2017
Kate Cronin-Furman studies mass atrocities and human rights. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in October 2015 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She also has a J.D. (Columbia, 2006) and has practiced law in New York, Cambodia, and The Hague. Kate’s research has been published or is forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly, Political Science & Politics, and the International Journal of Transitional Justice. She also writes regularly for the mainstream media, with recent commentary pieces appearing in Slate, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog, War on the Rocks, and Al Jazeera.
Dr. Valeria Luiselli
THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF SPACE, Spring 2018
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. She is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) and Faces in the Crowd (2013), and the books of essays Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends (2017) – all published by Coffee House Press. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, was described by the Texas Observer as "the First Must-Read Book of the Trump Era".
Her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Granta, Harper's and McSweeney's. She lives in Harlem, NY.
She is at work on her second novel, The Lost Children Archives (forthcoming Knopf 2018).
Rafia Zakaria, J.D
GUERILLA FEMINISM,Fall 2018
Rafia Zakaria is an author, attorney, and human rights activist who has worked on behalf of victims of domestic violence around the world. She is a columnist for Al Jazeera America, Ms., Dissent, and DAWN, Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper. Zakaria was born and raised in Karachi and now lives in Pakistan and the United States, where she serves on the board of directors of Amnesty International USA.
Retha Powers
WOMEN OF COLOR AND WRITING: ADVANCED NONFICTION, Fall 2018
Retha Powers has been the PCP Assistant Director since 2007. A long-time publishing professional, she is also a writer and editor. Her most recent publication is Bartlett's Familiar Black Quotations (Little, Brown and Company, 2013).
Dr. Meena Kandasamy
WOMAN OF COLOR AND WRITING: ADVANCED NONFICTION WORKSHOP, Fall 2018
Dr. Meena Kandasamy has actively sought to combine her love for the written word with the struggle for social justice through poetry, translation, fiction and essays for the last fifteen years.
Her debut collection of poems, Touch was themed around caste and untouchability, and her second, Ms Militancy, was an explosive, feminist retelling/reclaiming of Tamil and Hindu myths. Her critically acclaimed first (anti)novel, The Gypsy Goddess, smudged the line between powerful fiction and fearsome critique in narrating the 1968 massacre of forty-four landless untouchable men, women and children striking for higher wages in the village of Kilvenmani, Tanjore.
Her second novel, When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer As A Young Wife, drew upon her own experience within an abusive marriage, to lift the veil on the silence that surrounds domestic violence and marital rape in modern India. It was selected as book of the year by The Guardian, The Observer, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times; and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018 among others.
She holds a PhD in socio-linguistics. Her work has appeared in eighteen languages. She lived most of her life in Chennai, India and is mostly based in East London. In Fall 2018, she will be Global Faculty-in-Residence at Gallatin NYU teaching a course on feminist writing.
Dr. Asale Angel Ajani
ACTIVIST PRACTICUM, SPRING 2019
Asale Angel-Ajani is a writer, scholar and activist with expertise on Global Mass Incarceration, the African Diaspora, and the rights of women. She is the author of two books, Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade and the forthcoming, Parasitic States and Penal Colonies: Migration and the Carceral World Order and co-editor, with Victoria Sanford, of Engaged Observer: Activism, Advocacy and Anthropology. Over the last two decades, Angel-Ajani has worked with incarcerated women and men all over the world and has worked with refugees and displaced people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Italy, Spain, and Greece. She has been a research fellow at the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Institute and was the first American researcher to gain entry into Italy's Rebibbia Prison, where she wrote about African immigrants detained there. A graduate of Stanford University, Angel-Ajani has her doctorate in Anthropology. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing. She teaches a variety of courses but her favorite offerings explore the rise of the carceral state in a global context, creative writing, and Women of Color Feminist Theory.
Fathima Cader, J.D
ORDER IN THE COURTROOM: LAW AND LITERATURE, FALL 2019
Fathima Cader is a Toronto-based writer and litigator. Her essays, creative non-fiction, and poetry have been published in The New Inquiry, Hazlitt, Apogee, Fader, and elsewhere. She holds a Master of Arts in English from the University of Toronto and received Marlee G. Kline Essay Award from the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Law, among other awards. She teaches at the University of Windsor's Faculty of Law and is an incoming faculty member at the City College of New York's Beyond Identity program. Her interests include prison abolitionism, trans-national anti-colonialism, and worker organizing.
Dr. Sheriden Booker
WITCHES AND BRUJAS: EXHUMING THE VOICES AND HISTORIES OF AFRICAN-BASED RELIGIONS, Spring 2020
Dr. Sheriden Booker is a cultural strategist, artist, and and arts management consultant with training in the social sciences. She began her career in film and television production at Walt Disney Studios as a fellow of the Emma L. Bowen Foundation for Minorities in Media. However, her time as an international student at the University of Matanzas in Cuba piqued her interest in Africa and the African Diaspora, inspiring her to pursue graduate studies. For the past 15+ years, she has traveled and studied Afro-Atlantic history and orisha-based religious traditions in Nigeria, Brazil, and Cuba.
Booker holds a doctorate in African American Studies and Anthropology from Yale University, where she was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellowship for her research on the arts and race in post-Special Period Cuba. Her research interests include the impact of neoliberal capitalism and globalization on cultural production and religion, and the ways Afro-Atlantic religious practitioners formulate and embody narratives of resistance and tradition within and against these new social matrices.
An initiate of Regla de Ocha (Santería), Booker has been an invited speaker for programs hosted by The United Nations, the Interfaith Center of New York, the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, the Osun State Government of Nigeria, and the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute.
Christelle Jasmin
INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN OF COLOR ECO-FEMINISMS: FEMINIST INTERSECTIONS WITH OTHER ANIMALS AND THE EARTH, Summer 2020/2021
Christelle Jasmin is a scholar-activist, and American Studies graduate student at Rutgers University. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in International Studies with a concentration in Development and minor in Women’s and Gender studies. Christelle’s research unpacks the theoretical through-lines between critical animal studies, carceral studies, and anti-racist movement building. For her undergraduate thesis, she wrote a creative auto-theoretical paper entitled Criminal Animality: Food Justice, Prison Abolition and Black Feminisms. Christelle has since been engaged in many conversations surrounding eco-feminisms and carceral justice. In 2019, she presented an excerpt of her work to activists and colleagues at the People’s Forum, was later a guest lecturer in multiple undergraduate courses, and a keynote speaker at the NOVO Foundations Grantmakers for Girls of Color 2018 Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Christelle spends her summers teaching an undergraduate course based on her research called Introduction to Women of Color Eco-feminisms: Feminist interventions with other Animals and the Earth and working closely with THE KITE, an organization that teaches politically informed creative writing courses to incarcerated students of New York City. She has been the Fellowship Director and Community-Based-Organization Liaison of the Beyond Identity Scholar-Activism fellowship program at The City College of New York since 2018.
Nina Angela Mercer, M.F.A
A JOURNEY INSIDE CROSSINGS: POLITICAL FORM AND WRITING, Fall 2020/Spring 2021
Nina Angela Mercer is a cultural worker. Her plays include GUTTA BEAUTIFUL(The Warehouse Theatre, The Woolly Mammoth for DC’s Fringe, Abrons Arts Center, Little Carib Theatre); ITAGUA MEJI: A Road & A Prayer (Brecht Forum, Alternate Roots, Rutgers University Newark and New Brunswick, The Nuyorican Poets Café); GYPSY & THE BULLY DOOR(The Warehouse Theatre, the former Dumbo Sky); ELIJAHEEN BECOMES WIND (Anacostia Arts Center); CHARISMA AT THE CROSSROADS (Dorothy Young Arts Center); SPARROW(The Langston Hughes House); and A COMPULSION FOR BREATHING (The Schomburg Center and Target Margin Theater). Her writing is published in The Killens Review of Arts & Letters; Black Renaissance Noire; Voices Magazine #SayHerName Edition; Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance; Break Beat Poets Vol 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Press, 2018); Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the 21 st Century (Duke University Press, 2020); Performance Research (Taylor and Francis,2020); and the upcoming Represent! New Plays for Multicultural Young People (Bloomsbury Press, in press) and ASHE’: Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic Expressivity (Routledge, in press). As an interdisciplinary artist, Nina has recently performed with Angela’s Pulse for Paloma McGregor’s Building A Better Fishtrap/From the River’s Mouth (2018), and for Mercer’s video poem, created in collaboration with director Toshi Sakai, “Invocation for Josè Antonio Aponte,” for the exhibition Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom. Recently, she directed the devised performance (In)Visible Freedom by the women of Theater for Social Change at The Segal Center. Nina also works as a dramaturge and educator. She is a graduate of Howard University (BA 1995) and American University (MFA 2000). She also holds a Master of Philosophy in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center – CUNY (2020). Currently, Nina is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center-CUNY. She is a recipient of the August Wilson Blues Poetics Scholarship at the Norman Mailer Center, the AutoEthnography and Theater Fellowship with the Center for Humanities-CUNY, the Dean K. Harrison Research Fellowship, and the Toni Cade Bamabara Summer Fellowship from the Center for Humanities. She has taught at Howard University, American University, Medgar Evers College, and Brooklyn College. She is excited to join the Beyond Identity community.
DR. GRISELDA SOLOMON-RODRIGUEZ
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, SOLIDARITIES, AND TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS, Fall 2020
Dr. Griselda Rodríguez-Solomon (Dr. G.) is a Black-Dominican mother, wife and professor at the City College of New York. She earned her PhD in Sociology from Syracuse University. Griselda has conducted extensive research on anti-Black racism among Dominicans. Her expertise on internalized racism among Latinx communities has earned her features in Univision, NBC, Pero Like/Buzz Feed and Google. Along with her twin sister, Miguelina Rodriguez, PhD, they are the Brujas of Brooklyn. They design yoga workshops to help women of color heal from the effects of internalized oppression. Joy is Griselda’s main source of resistance.
Griseldarodriguez.com
Brujasofbrooklyn.com
Info@griseldarodriguez.com