Colonize This! | Joined by Daisy Hernandez & Bushra Rehman

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Join us for the 20th year anniversary celebration and gathering for Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism

For 20 years, Colonize This! has been a source of inspiration and grounding for women of color feminists, womanists and activists. As an empowering portrait of feminism practiced by women of color, it became an instant classic when it was first published, as well as a lodestar for a generation of Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx writers and activists. Recently, a new edition featuring writing on topics from gun violence to trans motherhood; serving as an abortion doula to organizing migrants; navigating call-out culture as a transgender Latina to challenging rape culture on campus was published.

Join us for a reading and conversation featuring writers from both editions: Sonia Guiñansaca, Shani Jamila, Bhavana Mody, Andrea Pino-Silva, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Tanmeet Sethi, Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and co-editors Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman.

Sonia Guiñansaca is an internationally acclaimed poet, culture strategist, and activist who was born in Ecuador (Kichwa-Kañari), and at the age of five, migrated to the United States to reunite with their parents in New York. Guiñansaca helped build some of the largest undocumented organizations in the U.S and co-founded some of the first artistic projects, writers retreats, and workshops for and by undocumented writers. They have been awarded residencies and fellowships from Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics, among others. They have performed at venues such as the Met and the Public Theater in New York City, and featured on PEN America, PBS, Interview Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Teen Vogue, and other media outlets. Sonia self-published their debut chapbook, Nostalgia and Borders, and contributed to the new edition of the ColonizeThis! Anthology and This is Not a Gun.They are the co-editor of the recent migrant anthology Somewhere We Are Human (Harpervia June 2022). They also launched House of Alegria, a multi-fold project supporting and investing in emerging (un)documented Queer, Trans, Non-Binary artists through an Artist in Residence Program, in-house publishing press, community workshops, and consultations.

 Shani Jamila is a conceptual artist & cultural producer who explores identity formation in African American and African diasporic communities. She utilizes her family’s genealogical records as a primary source and her travels to over fifty countries deeply inform her practice. Her paintings, soundscapes, and collages have been presented at the Manifesta European Contemporary Art Biennial, Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, Ace Hotel, Corridor Gallery and Harvard’s Cooper Gallery. She is the founder and host of Lineage— an archive of intimate, in-depth interviews with contemporary socially engaged Black artists. Her meditative film We Hold These Truths, produced with the Park Avenue Armory, features inspiring reflections on ancestry from a multidisciplinary cast of history shaping artists. Named “One of the 35 Most Remarkable Women in the World” by ESSENCE magazine, Shani's portrait and quote are featured in “A Choice to Change the World,” a permanent installation of artists & advocates at her alma mater Spelman College. Her work has been supported by the Aspen Institute, TED, MASS MoCA, Brooklyn Arts Council, National Arts Club, and the J. William Fulbright Foundation.

Bhavana Mody lives in Petaluma, California, where she indulges in hikes and long bike rides in the redwoods and near the Pacific Ocean. Since writing her essay for the first edition of Colonize This!, Bhavana has made several visits to India, deepening her relationships with her extended family and her culture and passionately taking up yoga and meditation. She has been teaching yoga for about fifteen years and is now a certified yoga therapist. She works in San Francisco public schools, leading movement and mindfulness for students. Perhaps one of the few South Asian yoga teachers/therapists in Sonoma County, Bhavana teaches yoga classes and Indian dance classes, shamelessly claiming her Indian-ness.

Andrea Pino-Silva: is the coauthor of We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out and cofounder of the national survi- vor advocacy organization End Rape on Campus. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a first-generation college student and was among the first survivors of campus sexual assault to publicly file a federal Title IX complaint. Her activism and personal journey is prominently featured in the 2015 Sundance film The Hunting Ground, and she appeared alongside Lady Gaga and fifty other survivors at the 2016 Academy Awards.  

Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is rooted in speculative events and personal freedom. She is the author of two short-story collections: Ancient, Ancient—winner of the 2012 James Tiptree Jr. Award—and When the World Wounds. Her essays have been published in Essence, Utne Reader, and Ms. She's the author of the middle grade novel When the World Turned Upside Down. A YA novel is forthcoming in 2023. Her writing and art are archived at kiburabooks.com and kiiniibura.com.  

Tanmeet Sethi, MD is an Integrative Family Physician, writer, and TEDx speaker (Watch “Two Words That Can Change Your Life” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHTmiHB6aXk) who has dedicated her career to care for the most marginalized patients including Seattle’s refugee, uninsured and homeless populations as well as global communities traumatized by manmade and natural disasters as Senior Faculty for the Center for Mind Body Medicine. She has been Core Faculty in residency medical education for the last two decades focusing on inpatient and outpatient family medicine, integrative medicine, and anti-racism in medicine. She is certified in Functional Medicine, fellowship trained in Integrative Medicine, and certified in Psychedelic Medicine, bringing together her passion for plant medicine and social justice. She is one of the original co-founders of APIChaya, an organization dedicated to supporting survivors of gender-based violence and human trafficking in the Asian/South Asian community. She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband and three children and is currently working on her first book, Joy Is My Justice (May 2023, Hachette)

 Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz is a queer, disabled, mixed-race Arab/ Jew who has been a racial and gender justice organizer for the past twenty-five years. She has written extensively on the issues of mixed- race identity—particularly as it relates to the work light- skinned people of color must do to challenge and dismantle white supremacy. In 2012 she was a member of the first LGBTQ delegation to Palestine. Since the first edition of Colonize This!, she has worked across multiracial movements as a capacity builder and strategist. She is currently the executive director of RoadMap.  

Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, which won the 2022 PEN /Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. She is also the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. The former editor of ColorLines magazine, she has reported for the New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and Slate, and she is an Associate Professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Bushra Rehman’s novel, Corona, a dark comedy about being Muslim American was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of its favorite novels about NYC and her collection of poems, Marianna’s Beauty Salon was described by Joseph O. Legaspi as a “love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving.” She is co-editor of the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and her newest novel, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion about friendship and queer desire among young Pakistani women is forthcoming from Flatiron Books.

Susan Muaddi Darraj is an award-winning writer of books for adults and children. She won an American Book Award, two Arab American Book Awards, and a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artists Award. In 2018, she was named a 2018 USA Artists Ford Fellow. Her book, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Jaime Manrique.   It also won the 2016 Arab American Book Award, a 2016 American Book Award, and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was published in 2007 by University of Notre Dame Press. For children, she has written numerous YA biographies, as well as the Farah Rocks chapter book series, the first to feature an Arab American protagonist.