The Sistorian Webinar (co-facilitated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Elle Gray)
As Toni Cade Bambara taught, sister is a verb! This webinar explores sistering as an intellectual practice and standard for engagement in an intellectual marketplace that encourages competition, tokenization and shade. Join sister-comrades Elle and Lex on Wednesday evenings this September as they draw on texts by black feminist historians, lead discussions on sistering as an intellectual practice and live online interviews with black feminist historian sheroes!
This course is in session and no longer available for sign-up. See other webinars here: www.alexispauline.com/brillianceremastered/webinars/
Here is some wisdom from the Sistorian Webinar Participants:
We Who Believe in Freedom: A Remix Poem for Sweet Ella and the Rest of Us
Sister is a Verb: Some Clarifications from the Sistorians
Enough: Affirmations that Sustain Sistorians
Love it?
Elle and Lex have collaborated on a number of projects and are co-authors of the companion curriculum for SPEAK! a CD featuring a collective of radical women of color writers. We are excited to invite you to participate in our newest collaboration…the Sistorian Webinar!!!
(you can sample the CD here by the way: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/gallery/speak.htm)
Laguana “Elle” Gray is an assistant professor of history at UTSA. She received a B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Houston and an M.A. from Louisiana Tech University. Dr. Gray teaches courses on recent American history, African American history, women’s history, and race. She plans also to teach courses in labor history. Her current research areas include the (U.S.) South, black women’s history, labor history, and black-brown relations. Her research interests lie in centering the roles women of color play in social movements, social policy, feminism, and creating alternative media. She is working to publish a book that chronicles the history of the lives and labors of black women in the southern poultry processing industry.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, a prayer poet priestess and has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Alexis was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University, and she is currently on tour with her interactive oracle project “The Lorde Concordance,” a series of ritual mobilizing the life and work of Audre Lorde as a dynamic sacred text. Alexis has also published widely on Caribbean Women’s Literature with a special interest in Dionne Brand. Her scholarly work is published in Obsidian, Symbiosis, Macomere, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Literature, SIGNS, Feminist Collections, The Black Imagination, Mothering and Hip Hop Culture, The Business of Black Power and more. Alexis is the author of an acclaimed collection of poems 101 Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive and poetic work published in Kweli, Vinyl, Backbone, Everyday Genius, Turning Wheel, UNFold, Makeshift and more. She has several books in progress including a book of poems, Good Hair Gone Forever, a scholarly monograph on diaspora and the maternal, and an educational resource called the School of Our Lorde. She is also the co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection on legacies of radical mothering called This Bridge Called My Baby.