Keynote Speaker, storäe michele

“The Black Women's Empowerment Conference at the Tufts Africana Center is a one-day event scheduled for April 9, 2022, and is open to all Black women and femme undergraduate and graduate students attending a university in the Northeast. Our conference seeks to empower Black women and femme postsecondary students by providing them with the networking and leadership skills necessary to succeed in their academic and professional careers. 

The theme for the 2022 BWEC Conference is Radical Self-Love. Our goal is to inspire conversations about care for oneself and one’s community, and to uplift Black women. This year we hope to achieve this goal by holding in-person and virtual accessible lectures, panels, and workshops featuring Black women scholars, industry professionals, and influencers. “Radical self-love summons us to be our most expansive selves, knowing that the more unflinchingly powerful we allow ourselves to be, the more unflinchingly powerful others feel capable of being.” -  Sonya Renee Taylor. “

co-facilatators, storäe michele + Jé Hooper

what is your truth? how do you tap into the worth of knowing?

let us journey together, as we reorient our personhood and imagine ourselves unearthing the quiet confidence within. in this Unlearning Retreat, join us in a practice of personal and communal freedom-making.

this gathering will be guided through a series of mini-workshops featuring storytelling through poetry, film, song, folklore, communal soundscapes and participant’s creation of short speculative rituals.

mama [rose.] film screening and conversation with storäe michele

moderated by Elyse Ambrose

mama [rose.], is an afro-futurist queer, circular time-traveling film following the stories of a non-binary teen, Sid, their trans archaeologist grandmother, Mama Rose, and their shared journey toward mending intergenerational wounds through VHS archives of past-present-furture times.

please register at: linktr.ee/baadbronx or visit BAADBronx.org

Thanks to a grant from New York City Artist Corps, 12 LGBTQIA+ Fellows from this year's Lambda Literary Writer's Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices will share 5-minute writing selections at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in NYC. A variety of genres will be represented, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The event includes ASL interpretation. Readers will participate in a hybrid format, with some appearing at the physical event and others online.

“The Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices is the nation’s premier LGBTQ writing residency. It is the only multi-genre writing residency devoted exclusively to emerging LGBTQ writers. The Retreat is an unparalleled opportunity to develop one’s craft and find community.

Since 2007, the Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices has offered sophisticated instruction in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young adult fiction, playwriting led by the most talented writers working today. In 2022, the Writer’s Retreat will expand to include instruction in screenwriting and speculative fiction.”

Private screening of mama [rose.], an original choreopoem.

Double film premiere screening featuring Jackie Rivera in Tiny Dyke; Van Life and storäe michele in mama [rose.].

A panelist on “Beyond Visibility: Actively Supporting Queer Black Womxn.”

“a practice in freedom-making, archive #28” film screening.

Judson Arts Wednesdays Presents: Works in Process: Conversations with storäe michele, hosted by Andre Daughtry, Judson’s Minister of the Arts.

Judson Arts Wednesdays special double feature screening.

Regional American Academy of Religion Conference.

Ethical Humanism developed from traditions of reason, philosophical inquiry, continuous learning. Until now, our community’s guiding philosophy is largely rooted in thought influenced by the Enlightenment, with an emphasis on reason and the individual. This has also largely excluded intuitive and experiential ways of knowing and learning. And as a dominant worldview, that tradition has often supported patriarchy, racism, and imperialism.

What if it is time to renew, reorient, decolonize? What does an Ethical Humanism look like with a wider canon, broader emphasis, an intentional effort to center the experience of those often silenced — even by us? How could this better center our commitment to human worth and human connection? How do we, with attention to serious theoretical work and experiential ways of knowing, develop practices that are inclusive, egalitarian, and healing? Come join us as we begin this work together.

Workshop Presenters are current Ethical Culture Leaders-in-Training: Christian Hayden, Jé Hooper, storäe michele, Sarah Tielemans.  (More about our Leaders-in-Training).) Additional presenter: Anthony Cruz, Liberation Theologian and Interreligious Scholar.

Who: Anyone who identifies as a humanist and/or Ethical Culturist and interested in growing and learning about how the Ethical Humanism might grow and change

What: An experiential workshop, where participants dialogue, reflect, create and embody a decolonized Ethical Humanist movement.

(Optional light breakfast and social hour from 9-10 am)

Humanitas film trailer.

Felix Adler (Ritchie Szoke), the founder and philosopher of the Ethical Culture Movement, and W.E.B. DuBois (Joe Tolbert), the author of “the Souls of Black Folk” and activist-scholar, are re-imagined in this histo-contemporary retrospective of July 1900. We journey with Adler and DuBois through a series of poetic prose, soulful music and choreo-movements, as they stir in one another justice through a new lens of nonreligious ethics, African-based spirituality, and civil philosophy.

DuBois, after completing a variety of lectures and books is endowed by spirit-of-rightness with a new love for the intersectionality of Africaniety; where all lives can’t matter until black lives matter. As a result, his passion becomes contagious to anyone who comes in contact with his infectious conscious-kindness–his heart-work becomes the coloring of white spaces.

Through an encounter with DuBois, Adler ‘weighs the soul’ of the young negro leader and establishes a life-changing relationship that is solidified at the first Pan-African Conference at the Westminster Hall in London. Adler is also challenged by this consciousness, conflicted by the thoughts of other intellectuals, who reveal a hidden unethical-racist agenda for scholastic fame, and a refusal to acknowledge the true souls and spirits of black folks.

Featuring:
Joe Tolbert, Ritchie Szoke, Sekani Radellant, storäe michele, Elyse Ambrose, Ryan Hill (RJ Love), Brotherhood Dance — Orlando Hunter & Ricarrdo Valentine, Jadele McPherson (Lukumi Arts), Charly Dominguez, E-Raq Diehl Tanika Williams, Kamran Prescott, Law’nence Miller, Bill Lewis, Robert Carito (RBear Carito), James C. Thompson, MehkiEl, and members of the American Ethical Union

Directed & created by Jé Hooper (2017 AEU Mossler Fellow)
Cinematographer: Orisha Photos & Cspinfilms Chris Guzman
Photographer/Imaging: Brianna N. Rohlehr
Edited by Chris Cspins Guzman, Dwayne Gayle, storäe michele
Music: Jadele McPherson & Lindsey Wilson
Set Director: Steven Styles Cobb

Make-up: Steven Steven ‘T’ Pacheco
Costume Designer: Leesa Thompson
Music producer: Kay’Vion RockBishop Sire

This workshop explores film as ritualistic resistance, through an Afro-Native Futuristic film about self-love and deep listening. [the listening heart], brings to life an original story grounded in Mayan and Yoruba cosmologies. Our protagonist, named after the Mayan Goddess Ix Chel, is a child healer who searches for the meaning of love. This story follows a common paradigm of women who are hurt when going against social norms—but in this film, reclaim their voices through self-healing. After the screening, we will create brave space to speak to the mistruths about love and ways to radically transform them.

“We are the ancestors of the future and what we do now will have an impact.” - Yeye Luisah Teish

Our traditions and religions can open a road of healing for everyone and anyone. Often serving as mirrors and resources during troubling times, there is a solace in finding a way to honor the divine within all forces of nature. However, as the ways in which people are expressing their gender, sexualities, and fluidity are shifting – have the practices expanded, or were they always in a certain alignment? For this session, we will explore examples of inclusive cosmologies of the past alongside contemporary instances of queering divinity. This closing of the Ancestors in Training series is explicitly being held as a community conversation among emerging thought leaders of the Black Diaspora.

Join Houiea LOVE (@houiea), Elliott Ray Lassi (@elliottraylassi), and Storäe Michele (@storae.michele), Thursday, October 11, 2018, for a community conversation on Queering Divinity, the final second session of the Ancestors in Training series!

This is part 3 of the 3-part Ancestors in Training series created and facilitated by Veronica Agard of Vera Icon LLC.

Contemporary Black Queer narratives are critical. Within the literary and theatre worlds, the necessity for stories that exceed the bounds of the white cis hetero imagination has never been more pronounced. In this Stoop Conversation, Black Queer writers, Donja R. Love, Hari Ziyad, Kleaver Cruz, Elyse Ambrose and storäe michele will share their works, anxieties, and visions for a Black Queer future as imagined and reckoned within their art. And there’s no better place to do so than on the stoop of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Bedstuy.