Bluestocking Bookstore
9/11/2010
This event at Bluestockings is part of the Community and Resistance Tour, an exciting project organized by several book publishers and independent media makers. The tour brings a multimedia presentation involving short films, inspiring speakers, and exciting dialogue. Organizers hope to communicate about current social justice struggles, from nooses hung in the northern Louisiana town of Jena to women organizing inside prisons, from battles around school privatization to post-Katrina community organizing and cultural resistance.
This event is for anyone interested in issues of health care, education, criminal justice, housing, or the ways in which racism and other forms of systemic oppression intersect with these struggles.
FEATURING:
Manju Rajendran is an organizer and artist. She is one of many founding members of Ubuntu, a women-of-color and survivor-led organization ending sexual assault and creating transformative love in Durham, NC. Manju is a long-time member and former worker of Southerners On New Ground (SONG), connecting race, class, gender, and sexuality, and she volunteers as a copy editor and occasional writer for Left Turn magazine. On tour, Manju will be telling the story of Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe, her family’s restaurant experiment in creative resiliency and food justice.
Jesse Muhammad: Energetic, inspiring and effective are just some of the words audiences have used to describe the writings and messages delivered by writer, news reporter, artist, publicist and photojournalist Jesse Muhammad.Brother Jesse, a native of Houston, Texas, started contributing to the Final Call Newspaper in 2004 and was appointed as its Southwest Regional Correspondent. In 2005, after receiving rave reviews for his reporting on stories that mainstream media tends to over look, he was appointed as an official Staff Writer for the FCN, which is the only national Black-owned newspaper. He has been a featured commentator on various television and radio shows in Houston, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Louisiana, and as far as Ghana.
Victoria Law is a writer, photographer and mother. After a brief stint as a teenage armed robber, she became involved in prisoner support. In 1996, she helped start Books Through Bars-New York City, a group that sends free books to prisoners nationwide. In 2000, she began concentrating on the needs and actions of women in prison,drawing attention to their issues by writing articles and giving public presentations. Since 2002, she has worked with women incarcerated nationwide to produce Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison and has facilitated having incarcerated women’s writings published in larger publications, such as Clamor magazine, the website “Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance” and make/shift magazine. Her book Resistance Behind Bars:The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press 2009) is the culmination of over 7 years of listening to, writing about and supporting incarcerated women nationwide and resulted in this former delinquent winning the 2009 PASS(Prevention for a Safer Society) Award.
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now! and appeared as a guest on CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Keep Hope Alive with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Haymarket Books has just released his new book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. For more info see floodlines.org.
LINKS:
Vimala’s CurryBlossom Cafe:
www.jessemuhammad.blogs.finalcall.com/
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now! and appeared as a guest on CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Keep Hope Alive with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Haymarket Books has just released his new book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. For more info see floodlines.org.
LINKS:
The Real Cost of Prisons Project created workshops, a website which includes sections of writing and comix by prisoners, a daily news blog focused on mass incarceration and three comic books. See:
www.jessemuhammad.blogs.finalcall.com/
