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About The Words of Fire Conference

In April 2017, Black Women’s Blueprint and the Spelman Women's Research and Resource Center will co-convene a conference at the historic Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia to recognize the first anniversary of the groundbreaking Black Women’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Sexual Assault (BWTRC)  which propelled to center stage Black women and girls' experiences with sexual and reproductive violation in an outcry against the lack of recognition and justice, and in a process of truth and healing for Black women and girls.

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On the One-Year Anniversary of the BWTRC we will honor the work of the contributors to Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, as well as the Black feminist shapeshifters and waymakers whose words helped survivors give life to the Commission and its groundbreaking Tribunal in 2016

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We therefore invite all truth-seeking, fire-breathing, soul-searching activists, grassroots artists, and academics of the U.S. and formerly so-called Third World to gather in this special summit honoring Black feminists who've made it their life's work to create language to inform a practice of decolonizing and decommodifying the connections between Black women's power, their agency, their choices and their pleasure, making these issues inherently racial justice concerns.

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We aim for the conference to be provocative both politically and sexually, this conference will offer inspiring accounts by a cross-section of women, girls, queer, trans women of African Descent in order to deconstruct patriarchal ideologies that women and girls are to be taught consistently and often violently, that their bodies are corrupting, imperfect, violable and volatile harbingers of  immorality. Celebrating, reclaiming and engaging in memory work, political dialogue and action which centers Black women's traditions, as well as various spiritualities as well as healing modalities, the conference will combine visioning workshops, panels, debates, art and interactive speakers committed to empowering and cultivating new generations of Black girls and young women with revolutionary Black feminist politics. Building on the words of our foresisters, we are the offspring bringing Black feminism into the future. Join us.

 Words of Fire

HONOREES

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