Season 2 Episode 5:Raising Superheroes with adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown
What do our superpowers teach us about our longings? How do we create spaces for young people to fully step into their voices and power? In this special episode, we’re SO thrilled to be joined by our favorite sci fi & Afrofuturism visionaries, Autumn and adrienne maree brown! Join our juicy conversation about love, parenthood, imagination, youth, magic, and longing as we explore the new scifi show “Raising Dion. Tell us what you think @thebigwepodcast and hello@thebigwepodcast.com
Supplemental Links:
“How to Survive the End of the World” - adrienne & Autumn’s Podcast about “learning from the apocalypse with grace, rigor and curiosity”
Pleasure Activism adrienne’s most recent book about the importance of awakening desire and pleasure on the path to liberation
Octavia’s Brood anthology of visionary science fiction and speculative fiction written by organizers and activists, co-edited by adrienne maree brown and featuring Autumn Brown’s writing
Emergent Strategy - by adrienne maree brown is a radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help book designed to shape the futures we want to live
About adrienne maree brown
adrienne maree brown is a writer. She attended the Clarion Sci Fi Writers Workshop and the Hedgebrook Writers Residency in 2015, and Voices of Our Nation in 2014 as part of the inaugural Speculative Fiction Workshop. She was a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and a 2013 and 2015 Knights Arts Challenge winner, writing and generating science fiction in and about Detroit. She was the Ursula Le Guin Feminist Sci Fi Fellow, and a Sundance/Time Warner 2016 Artist Grant Recipient.
adrienne is the author of the radical self/planet help book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds published by AK Press in 2017. She is also the co-editor of the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements with Walidah Imarisha, published by AK Press in 2015. She has helped to cultivate work and thinking about Octavia Butler and Emergent Strategy, gathering a loose knit network of people interested in reading Octavia’s work from a political and strategic framework.
In terms of writing, adrienne blogs regularly on this site, writes the Pleasure Dome column at Bitch magazine, and is a contributing editor for YES! magazine.
adrienne was the facilitator of the founding year of the Detroit Narrative Agency (DNA), supporting Detroiters to shift the narratives of the city towards justice and liberation. DNA just announced it’s 2016 Cohort.
adrienne is in Somatics Teacher Training to deepen her healing, doula and facilitation work. She is part of the Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity team, at the intersection of political education, community organizing, somatics and black love.
She facilitates the internal healing and visionary development of organizations throughout the movement (most recently BYP100, Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter. She has also worked with Building Equity and Alignment for Impact Initiative, Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Chorus Foundation, Correctional Association of NY, Young Women United, Positive Women’s Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, INCITE!, the Young Women’s Empowerment Project in Chicago, New Orleans Parents Organizing Network, ColorofChange.org and Detroit Summer).
adrienne was a co-facilitator for the Detroit Food Justice Task Force, facilitator for Detroit Future, and the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, as well as part of the faculty for the Center for Whole Communities. She partnered with Engage to facilitate a year-long Community of Practice on Networks and Decentralizing Leadership, 2011-2012.
adrienne was the executive director of The Ruckus Society from 2006-2010, and sat on their board through 2012. She was also a National Co-Coordinator for the 2010 US Social Forum.
adrienne is on The Ruckus Society board, and is proud to have spent time on social justice organization boards including Allied Media Projects, Third Wave Foundation, and Common Fire, as well as many others.
A co-founder of the League of Pissed Off/Young Voters and graduate of the Somatics and Social Justice Cohort, Somatics and Trauma year-long, Rockwood’s Art of Leadership year-long training, and Robert Gass’s Art of Change year-long training, adrienne is obsessed with learning and developing models for action, community strength, movement building and transformation.
adrienne is writing Detroit-based science fiction. Her science fiction writing path is grounded in the belief that we must train ourselves to ‘imagine a new possible’ into being, building compelling futures that makes us want to survive. Her science fiction writing is based in years of science fiction scholarship – reading science/visionary/speculative fiction and applying lessons and comparisons to political situations in the current world.
About Autumn Brown
Autumn Brown is a mother, organizer, theologian, artist, and facilitator. The youngest child of an interracial marriage, rooted in the complex lineages of counter-culturalism and the military industrial complex, Autumn is a queer, mixed-race woman who identifies closely with her African, European, and white lineages, and a gifted facilitator who grounds her work in healing from the trauma of oppression.
She was a founding member of the Rock Dove Collective, a radical community health exchange active in New York City from 2006-2012, and she serves on the national Board of Directors of the Common Fire Foundation. Autumn brings over 10 years of experience facilitating organizational and strategic development with community-based and movement organizations, and training organizers in Consensus Process, Facilitation, and Racial Justice. She has taught and presented in many places across the country, as well as internationally. She has facilitated with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, Slow Food USA, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice, among many others.
Autumn is a Worker-Owner at the Anti-Oppression Resource & Training Alliance (AORTA), a worker-owned cooperative devoted to strengthening movements for social justice and a solidarity economy through political education, training, and planning. Prior to that, Autumn served as the Interim Executive Director of RECLAIM!, and the Executive Director of the Central Minnesota Sustainability Project.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Autumn has also completed specialized study in Theology at Oxford University and the General Theological Seminary of New York. She is a speculative fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and has kept a blog at iambrown.org for since 2006. Most recently she has been published in the Procyon Science Fiction Anthology (Tayen Lane Press, 2016), Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016), and Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press, 2015).
