Your auntie’s sitting room 50 years in the future. All your cousins are there โ the artists, engineers, city planners, gas station owners, the ones whose jobs we don’t have names for yet, and their kids. Conversation sways between neighborhood gossip and the politics of the interstellar federation. Tea and cookies are served. Drawing from art, literature, activism, and contributions collected during MOVE, we will facilitate an interactive space for envisioning what SWANA futurism could, might, and will be.
Kamelya Omayma Youssef is a writer, teacher and organizer from Dearborn, Michigan. Currently, she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at New York University, where she is working on several poetry manuscripts as well as a play. Her poems and essays have been published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Mizna, Agape, Bird’s Thumb and on the theater stage with A Host of People. Among her awards and honors, Youssef has been an artist in residence at Habibi House, received the Judith Siegel Pearson Award in 2017 and won the Phillip Lawson Hatch Jr. Memorial Writing Competition in English.
Leila Abdelrazaq is a Palestinian author and artist born in Chicago and currently living in Detroit. Her debut graphic novel, Baddawi (Just World Books, 2015), was shortlisted for the 2015 Palestine Book Awards and has been translated into three languages. She is also the author and Illustrator of The Opening (Tosh Fesh, 2017) as well as several zines and short comics.ย Her creative work primarily explores issues related to diaspora, refugees, history, memory and borders. Abdelrazaq is co-founder of Maamoul Press, a multi-disciplinary collective for the creation, curation and dissemination of art by marginalized creators whose work lies at intersections of comics, print making and book arts.
Levon Kafafian creates tactile and sensory works on the threshold of transition, applying the process of weaving beyond thread into visual, performative and social practice. They practice in the Detroit community using textile craft, ancestral futurism and magical experience. Kafafian is Co-Creative Director of Fringe Society, an artist collective that creates hybrid, experimental works toward a more just and equitable future. Kafafian is a New York-born Armenian and long-term Detroit resident.
Session tags: activism, art, youth empowerment, narrative and storytelling
Location:ย Salon I