Fire Dreams: Reproductive Justice and Black Feminism in the South

We invite you to join us for this timely event that centers the long and unbroken history of Black women's health activism, from New Orleans to Baltimore. This intimate conversation is grounded in the just-released book Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South, and organized as a partnership among co-authors Deon Haywood and Laura McTighe and Bloom Collective. Fire Dreams is a vital toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars, and all those who dream to make the world otherwise. Together, we will share lessons from Women with a Vision's thirty five years of work and build connections to organizing in Baltimore and beyond. This intimate gathering is a chance to be in community, learn together and radically imagine a way forward.

About Fire Dreams:

For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective, Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice and sex workers' rights. In 2012, shortly after one of WWAV's biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed their headquarters. Fire Dreams in an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization's post-arson rebirth. Rooting WWAV in the geography of the South and the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers, WWAV and McTighe weave together stories from their founders' pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina---with other movements for liberation as accomplices. Together, the authors refuse the logics of racial capitalism and share WWAVs own world-building knowledges, as well as their methods for living these Black feminst futures now.

The official theme for Black Maternal Health Week 2024 is: "Our Bodies STILL Belong to Us: Reproductive Justice NOW!" Bloom Collective is a Kindred Partner with the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, and has been hosting events since the start of this important week in 2018 and beyond.

The Panelists:

Laura McTighe is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University and the Co-Founder of Women With A Vision's research arm, Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans.

Deon Haywood is Executive Director of Women With A Vision, a New Orleans-based organization that has organized for Black feminist liberation in the South for decades

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University. She is also the Director of LifeXCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure

Tanay Lynn Harris is the Director and Co-Founder of the Bloom Collective, a seasoned organizer and abolitionist.

Event Venue

The Bloom Collective, 2000 Greenmount Avenue, Baltimore, United States