CHICAGO, IL
SUN MAY 1 - 4:00 PM
WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST BOOKSTORE
5233 N Clark Street
Author Reading: REVOLUTIONARY MOTHERING: LOVE ON THE FRONT LINES
Celebrate Mother’s Day with this free reading, signing, and conversation, featuring Co-editors China Martens and Mai’a Williams, as well as contributor Karen Su. No reservation required. Please join us!
Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s and ’80s, Revolutionary Mothering places marginalized mothers of color at the center of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation are the same challenges that many mothers face every day. Oppressed mothers create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits, activate a powerful vision of the future while navigating tangible concerns in the present and embrace collective solutions. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.
Mai’a Williams is a writer and poet and lives in the U.S. with her daughter, Theresa. She worked in Quito, Ecuador in 2014 and 2015 as a journalist for teleSUR English, the global Venezuelan revolutionary news agency. From 2009 through 2013, she was a community organizer and journalist before, during and after the Egyptian revolution. In January 2009, she spent three days in Israeli detention with her one-year old daughter, during the bombings on Gaza, and after being freed from Israeli jail, she moved to Cairo and organized outreach programs with Sudanese teenage refugees/gang members. It was her living and working with Palestinian, Congolese, and Central American indigenous mothers in resistance communities, that initially inspired her to become a mother and continues to guide her as she practices this life-giving work, called radical mothering.
China Martens is an empty nest single mother from Baltimore. She is the author of The Future Generation: The Zine- Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others (Atomic Book Company, 2007), and coeditor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities (PM Press, 2012). China was a cofounder of Kidz City, a radical childcare collective in Baltimore (2009-2013) and is connected to a national circle of radical childcare collectives established at the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit.
Karen Su is a clinical assistant professor in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she directs the UIC Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) Initiative. She has served as the founding director of two student centers: the Asian American Resource and Cultural Center at UIC and the Pan-Asian American Community House at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Oak Park, IL, with her two children who are now fifteen and eleven, where she helped establish a parents’ organization called Families and Friends of Asian American Students (FAASt). She is working on a series of children’s books that share the life stories of everyday Asian American girls and women.