Kitana Ananda

Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Duke University Press, 2024)tells the story of New Orleans–based Women With A Vision (WWAV) and the collective’s Black feminist liberatory praxis rooted in the U.S. South. Since 1989, WWAV has organized with Black women, queer and trans communities of color, sex workers, drug users, and people living with HIV/AIDS against the criminalization of their communities.

Abolitionist organizer, advocate, and author Andrea J. Ritchie hadn’t planned to write a book about emergent strategies for social transformation. After all, as she admits in Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, Ritchie is “an unlikely emergent strategist” (p. 1) who was raised to practice the organized Left’s traditional power-building strategies.

Editors’ note: This article is from NPQ’s winter 2022 issue, “New Narratives for Health.” Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork. When I sat down with Dr. Lourdes Ashley Hunter-Fowler to discuss her healing justice work and two-decades-long journey as an activist for trans rights, we paused—at her request and to my delight—to take a few deep, synchronous breaths and ground ourselves before starting the interview.