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REVOLUTIONARY NONVIOLENCE
Building Bridges Across Generations and Communities
War Resisters League
90th Anniversary National Conference
August 1 – 4 · 2013
Georgetown University | Washington, DC.
SPEAKERS / RESOURCE PERSONS
Nada Alwadi is a Bahraini journalist, writer and researcher. She has been working in print media since 2003 covering politics and human rights issues in Bahrain and the Middle East. She holds a Master’s degree in Mass Communication with an emphasis on women's political empowerment in the media. She was a Humphrey/Fulbright fellow at the school of journalism in the University of Maryland. Alwadi covered the recent crackdown in Bahrain for several international media outlets including USA Today. In 2011, she was one of the recipients for the first James Lawson Award for Nonviolent Achievement by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. Alwadi co-founded the Bahraini Press Association with other prominent Bahraini journalists in 2011.
Rooj Alwazir is a Yemeni-American organizer in Washington D.C. Rooj's commitment to social justice and her love of digital storytelling earned her a multimedia communications degree from Marymount University. After college, Rooj moved to Egypt, teaching English and photography to youth Sudanese refugees. After a year, she moved back to Washington DC and began working with a non-profit, that teaches DC Youth photography as a tool for social change. On her off times, she was organizing locally, building a variety of organizing campaigns, including an eviction and anti-foreclosure campaign. Today, Rooj is between Yemen and Washington D.C. organizing around the U.S. drone wars. Rooj is also co-founder of SupportYemen media collective, producing short videos on social justice issues in Yemen. (P.S.. she has a crazy passion for Woody Allen movies and espresso.)
Jan Barry is a poet, author, editor and educator. A co-founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and member of Veterans For Peace, he is the author of A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, Life After War & Other Poems and co-editor of Winning Hearts & Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, among other works. He currently works with the Combat Paper and Warrior Writers projects to provide art and writing therapy workshops for military veterans and family members. For more information: www.janbarry.net
Clare Bayard is an organizer with Catalyst Project, an anti-racist movement building center, and is a demilitarization activist from a military family. Clare got involved in anti-militarist work through migrant justice and global justice movements in the late 90s, and has been deeply involved in the G.I. resistance movement for the last 8 years, working closely with Iraq Veterans Against the War and the Civilian-Soldier Alliance, and has served on the National Committee of War Resisters League since 2005. Clare is a member of War Times/Tiempo de Guerras and a longtime organizer in the Palestine solidarity and international conscientious objector movements. Clare organizes to connect domestic racial and economic justice struggles against the root causes of war with international movements to challenge global capitalism and U.S. empire. Clare believes that action from alliances between organizations taking on different aspects of militarism, from prison abolition to anti-bases work, is critical to creating a future world that our kids can survive in.
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She has been a writer, analyst, and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. In 2001 she helped found and remains on the advisory board of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. She worked closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition from its origins, co-chairs the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine, and plays an active role in the global peace movement. Her books include Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy US Power and Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer
Frida Berrigan serves on the Board of the War Resisters League and organizes with Witness Against Torture. A graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, Frida worked for six years with the World Policy Institute, a progressive think-tank based at the New School University. She is a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and a contributing editor to In These Times magazine.
Leslie Cagan has worked in peace and social justice movements for more than 4 decades: from the Vietnam war to racism at home, from nuclear disarmament to lesbian/gay liberation, from fighting sexism to working against U.S. military intervention. Leslie helped create and served as the National Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition that grew to over 1,400 member groups. Her coalition-building and organizing skills have mobilized hundreds of thousands of people in many of the nation's largest demonstrations and literally hundreds of other public events and activities including: the million person June 12, 1982 Nuclear Disarmament demonstration in NYC; the historic lesbian/gay rights march on Washington on October, 1987; the march on Washington against the Gulf War in January, 1991; and the largest mobilizations against the war in Iraq (2/15/03, 3/22/03, 8/29/04, 9/24/05 and 1/27/07).
Leslie's major organizing projects have included: work against the first War against Iraq, normalization of U.S./Cuba relations, work in the LGBT and women’s movements, efforts against the occupation of Palestine, work against police brutality and for budget equity, and much more. She’s worked on several progressive electoral campaigns, including serving as the Field Director in the 1988 Dinkins Mayoral race in NYC. Her writings appear 9 anthologies, and in scores of journals, newspapers and on-line outlets. She played a major role in winning back the nation’s first listener-sponsored media network and was chair of the Interim Pacifica Radio National Board.
Mandy Carter is a southern black lesbian social justice activist with a 45-year movement history of social, racial,and lesbigaytrans justice organizing since 1968. Her very first movement position was in 1969 when she joined the staff of WRL/West in San Franciso. Followed by staff positions at WRL/Los Angeles and WRL/Southeast in Durham, NC. She was co-coordinator of the WRL 50th Annivesary Conference in 1973 and is on the WRL 90th Anniversary Conference Committee. Currently, she is the National Coordinator of the Bayard Rustin 2013 Commemoration Project of the National Black Justice Coalition in this 50th anniversary year of the 1963 March on Washington. www.nbjc.org/bayard-rustin. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist, writer and activist. Among her books are Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. She is the founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports and generates cutting-edge journalism on poverty.
Emma’s Revolution
"Boasting gorgeous close harmonies and unsinkable tunefulness, Emma’s Revolution (the Emma is Goldman) is a classic, globetrotting folk duo comprised of activist singer/songwriters Sandy O and Pat Humphries. Their music is progressive, socially-conscious, confrontational and shot-through with intelligence and cutting humor. Newest disc 'Revolutions Per Minute' is a front-to-back gem." ~Iowa City Press-Citizen
Smart, funny and informative--like Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart with guitars, Emma's Revolution is the duo of award-winning activist musicians, Pat Humphries & Sandy O. Called “inspiring, gusty and rockin’”, Emma's Revolution's songs have been sung for the Dalai Lama, praised by Pete Seeger and covered by Holly Near. The duo's awards include Grand Prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and, for the second year in a row, the Washington Area Music Association's Fan Favorite Award. Emma's Revolution's music has been featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" and Pacifica's "Democracy Now!"
Pat Humphries & Sandy O are partners in life, love and justice. In the spirit of Emma Goldman's famous attribution, “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution,” the Washington DC-based duo brings their uprising of truth, hope, harmony and groove to concerts and peace & justice events around the world. Join the revolution. www.emmasrevolution.com
Kathy Engel has spent more than thirty years as a cultural worker, writer, educator, producer and consultant in the meeting place of imagination and social justice/change.
She was founder and first director of the organization MADRE, and has co founded and worked with numerous social justice, peace, and human rights efforts. Her books include “Banish the Tenative” (chapbook), 989; “Ruth’s Skirts”, IKON, 2007; and “We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon”, Interlink Publishing 2007, which she co-edited with Kamal Boullata. She is co founder and co director with Alexis De Veaux of Lyrical Democracies, and its Center for Poetic Healing. She is a Visiting Assistant Arts Professor in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Art & Public Policy Program and an advisor at the Gallatin School of NYU. Poems have most recently appeared in Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal/Split This Rock Chapbook, 2012; The Mom Egg, and Adanna. She was a 2012 Featured Poet at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival, and a fellow at the Hedgebrook Women Writers Retreat in June 2012. She recently traveled to Ithaca, Greece, as an invited poet in the “Return to Ithaca” festival.
Julie M. Hughan Finch is the great niece of Jessie Wallace Hughan, the founder of WRL. Julie came to her first WRL conference as a baby at about a year old. Julie is a preservationist, as co-chair of Friends of the Gibbons Underground Railroad site in NYC, and got it landmarked, as well as establishing the Lamartine Pl. Historic District. She works at Bowne Printers, part of the South St. Seaport Museum. She is a member of Coming To the persons who enslaved them. At 15th St Monthly Meeting, Religious Society of Friends, (Quakers), NYC, Julie is co-chair of the Peace Committee. Her late ex-husband Donald Judd used to help Karl Bissinger with fundraising art benefit shows, and her late father Roy Finch was a former chairman of the WRL, and editor of Liberation Magazine.
Bruce Gagnon coordinates the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space and has been working on space issues for the last 30 years. Between 1983–1998 Bruce was the State Coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice. In 1987 he organized the largest peace protest in Florida history (with help from Leslie Cagan and Mobilization for Survival) when over 5,000 people marched on Cape Canaveral in opposition to the first flight test of the Trident II nuclear missile. He was the organizer of the Cancel Cassini Campaign (launched 72 pounds of plutonium into space in 1997) that drew enormous support and media coverage around the world and was featured on the TV program 60 Minutes.
Bruce initiated the Maine Campaign to Bring Our War $$ Home in 2009 that spread to other New England states and beyond. This campaign makes the important connections between endless war spending and fiscal crisis throughout the U.S.
Bruce has been featured by artist Robert Shetterly in his collection of portraits and quotes entitled Americans Who Tell The Truth. He is a Vietnam-era veteran and is active with Veterans for Peace. He was trained as an organizer by the United Farm Workers Union.
Arun Gupta is a co-founder of the Indypendent newspaper and the Occupy Wall Street Journal. He is a regular contributor to Truthout, In These Times, The Progressive and The Guardian, and is a Lannan Foundation writing fellow.
Kimber Heinz is the National Organizing Coordinator with the War Resisters League. She is currently working on many projects, including supporting the current G.I. coffeehouses and building the globally-based Facing Tear Gas campaign to end the use of tear gas and related chemical weapons. She is a board member of Under the Hood Cafe, a GI coffeehouse based outside of Ft. Hood, TX. Currently based in Durham, North Carolina, Kimber is also a member-leader of Southerners on New Ground, a queer, multiracial base-building organization with chapters across the South.
Ali Issa is the national field organizer with War Resisters League, where his work includes co-coordinating the Facing Tear Gas campaign. He has worked as an organizer with the Street Vendor Project and with the Palestine Education Project, a collective of educators and artists that creates popular education materials which connect local struggles in Brooklyn to what's happening in Palestine. Ali has also worked with Iraqi labor unions, on a reparations initiative for Iraq and is a contributor to Jadaliyya on Iraqi social movements.
Charlie King and Karen Brandow are musical storytellers and political satirists. Their repertoire covers a century and a half and four continents. They perform with the sweet and precise harmonies of life partners. They sing and write passionately about the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. In addition to a full time career of concert touring, King and Brandow have sung in support of numerous groups working for peace, human rights, environmental sanity and alternatives to violence.
Charlie King has been at the heart of American folk music for half a century. His songs have been recorded and sung by other performers such as Pete Seeger, Holly Near, Ronnie Gilbert, John McCutcheon, Arlo Guthrie, Peggy Seeger, Chad Mitchell and Judy Small. Honors include an “Indie” award for one of the top three American folk recordings of 1984. In May of 1998 the War Resisters League gave their Peacemaker Award to Charlie and to Odetta. Pete Seeger nominated Charlie for the Sacco-Vanzetti Social Justice Award, which he received in November 1999.
Karen Brandow has been performing with Charlie King since 1998. While doing human rights work in Guatemala from 1986-1994, Karen studied voice, performance and classical guitar. She performed at political and cultural events in that country as a soloist and was a founding member of the a cappella singing group, the Non-Traditional Imports.
Randy Kehler has been actively engaged for the past 40 years in research, writing, organizing, and advocacy regarding a range of public policy issues including energy and land reform, electoral democracy, and nuclear disarmament. A graduate of Harvard College, he worked in the WRL West office in San Francisco during the Vietnam War. Randy spent 22 months in federal prison for his refusal to cooperate with the Vietnam draft. Randy is a co-founder of the Traprock Peace Center, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign and the Working Group on Electoral Democracy. As conscientious objectors to war, Randy and his wife Betsy Corner have for many years redirected their federal income tax payments to non-military needs such as food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, and relief for war victims (including U.S. soldiers). Their war-tax refusal and the story of the IRS seizure of their home is the subject of an award winning documentary film entitled “An Act of Conscience” (Turning Tide Productions, 1994).
Ynestra King is a long-time writer and activist, and a founding mother of ecofeminism, which integrates feminism, ecology and the philosophy and politics of radical non-violence. She is currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, working on a documenting the lives of women with disabilities. She is also an editor of two books, Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics and Dangerous Intersections: Feminism, Population and the Environment. and the author of numerous critical essays and articles She has taught at the New School, the University of Massachusetts and the Institute for Social Ecology at Goddard College, and lectured at many colleges and universities in the U.S., Latin America and Europe, and she is currently active in the anti-pipeline movement in New York City, where she lives.
Sachio Ko-yin, organizer in both anarchist and radical pacifist movements, has contributed radical theory work to publications and blogs such as Occupy Philly Media and "Anarchia." Sachio was a co-founder of the WRL Local “Root & Branch in Northern New Jersey. He served a two and a half year prison sentence as part of the Minuteman Three Plowshares action of 1998. Sachio has written for the Nonviolent Activist and WIN Magazine, and has served on the National Committee of WRL.
Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development renewable energy and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is a two time vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader for the Green Party. As Program Director of the Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on the issues of climate change, renewable energy, and environmental justice with Indigenous communities. And in her own community, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation based non profit organizations in the country, and a leader in the issues of culturally based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy and food systems. In this work, she also continues national and international work to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.
In 2007, LaDuke was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, recognizing her leadership and community commitment. In 1994, LaDuke was nominated by Time magazine as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. She has been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, Ms. Woman of the Year
(with the Indigo Girls in l997) , and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which in part she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project. She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and is presently an advisory board member for the Trust for Public Lands Native Lands Program as well as a board member of the Christensen Fund. The Author of five books, including Recovering the Sacred, All our Relations and a novel - Last Standing Woman, she is widely recognized for her work on environmental and human rights issues.
Michael Loadenthal is a proud father, anarchist organizer, clandestine conspirator, and academic insurgent based in Washington, DC. Over the past fifteen years he has been involved in a number of anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian projects around the world, and at present focuses his energies on developing challenges to the State’s criminalization of dissent targeting anarchists and animal/earth liberationists. Since 2011, Michael has taught “Terrorism and Political Violence” at Georgetown University, and served as a doctoral Fellowship at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (George Mason University). Currently, he splits his time between raising a vegan daughter, researching Statecraft, photographing graffiti, teaching theory, writing constantly, and agitating for a better world. He regularly publishes propaganda and political theory under a variety of pseudonyms, and is the co-writer of the blog “Thoughts of a Pregnant Vegan.”
Jendog Lonewolf is a Hip Hop MC/lyricist and photographer, mixed with Blackfoot, Cherokee, and the Grand Cayman Islands, born & bred in pre-hipster/pre-gentrified Bushwick, Brooklyn. A Self-proclaimed Ghetto Ambassador, Jendog navigates multiple spaces delivering messages of Love, Life and Self-defense through her sharp, layered lyricism and her organic photography. She delivers hard-hitting, factual rhymes loaded with veracity, telling stories of how she lives, loves, and sees. Her music has been featured in and independent film and on several mixtapes including Coast2Coast Mixtapes and the AWOL Magazine Mixtape. Jendog has graced stages such as NYC's Cures-Not-Wars Parade, Props To Hip Hop: Fugees Tribute, the Stolen Lives Induction Ceremony, NuYorican Poet's Cafe, Psuedo.com, Lion’s Den, Galapagos, City College, New York University, and also shared a stage with the R&B legend Nile Rodgers as part of Three Dot Dash’s third annual Just Peace Summit at the Bitter End. She has performed for Oberlin College, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, New Orleans during Mardia Gras, Jazz Fest, and Voodoo Fest and the Blue Nile. Jendog recently returned from a tour in Cambodia, India, and Sri Lanka with YaliniDream.
Michael McPhearson is the National Coordinator for United For Peace and Justice and a board member and former Executive Director of Veterans For Peace. He works closely with the Newark based People’s Organization for Progress and publishes the Mcphearsonreport.org expressing his views on war and peace, politics, human rights, race and other things. Michael recently launched Reclaimthedream.org website as an effort to change the discourse and ignite a new conversation about Dr. Martin Luther King’s message and what it means to live in just and peaceful communities.
In 1981 at the age of 17, Michael joined the Army Reserve as an enlisted soldier; he is a ROTC graduate of Campbell University in Buies Creek, NC with a degree in Sociology. A native of Fayetteville North Carolina, Michael was a field artillery officer in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during Desert Shield /Desert Storm. Michael’s military career includes 6 years of reserve and 5 years active duty service. He separated from active duty in 1992 as a Captain. During his time in the Army he held numerous positions, attended Airborne School and received several awards. As a civilian, he has held positions with various profit and not-for-profit entities including not-for-profit public radio station KWMU, the National Conference for Community and Justice and as executive director of Veterans For Peace. He has been an active member of the Greater Saint Louis Association of Black Journalists, the ACLU, and Military Families Speak Out He served on the Executive Committee of the St. Louis Branch of the NAACP and the Steering Committee of the Bring Them Home Now campaign. In December 2003 Michael returned to Iraq as part of a peace delegation to examine the occupation firsthand. He has spoken all over the U.S. to small gatherings and large crowds. He has also traveled to Istanbul Turkey and Bologna Italy as a speaker on the U.S. peace movement and world peace.
David McReynolds, born, 1929, Los Angeles, Educated at UCLA, graduated with a degree in political science.
Joined War Resisters League and the Fellowship of Reconciliation from 1949 on. Moved to New York City, 1956, became editorial secretary of Liberation Magazine in 1957. Became the Field Secretary of War Resisters League in 1960, remained on the staffuntil 1999.Served on the War Resisters International Council for a decade, served a term as Chair of War Resisters International. Traveled widely during this time to Japan, Vietnam, and Europe, organizing against the Vietnam War and the Nuclear Arms race.
Joined the Socialist Party in 1951. Ran for Congress in New York City in 1968 as the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. Ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket in 1980 and 2000. Served several terms as Co-Chair of the Socialist Party. Ran for US Senate from New York State in 2004 on the Green Party ticket.
Wrote one book, We Have Been Invaded by the 21st Century. Served on the editorial board of WIN magazine from its launching, and on the board of the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute. In 1969, in a WIN Gay Liberation issue, with Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, he wrote one of the first articles coming out as a homosexual.
Arrested on various occasions, jailed briefly several times.
Matt Meyer, a native New York City-based educator, activist, and author, is the War Resisters International Africa Support Network Coordinator, and a United Nations/ECOSOC representative of the International Peace Research Association. The founding chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and former Chair of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development (COPRED), Meyer has long worked to bring together academics and activists for lasting social change. A former public draft registration resister and chair of the War Resisters League, he continues to serve as co-convener of the War Resisters International Africa Working Group. Meyer’s writings appear in numerous journals, magazines, and on-line news sites, including Waging Nonviolence, New Clear Vision, WIN magazine and the journal Peace and Change. His most recent of six books is We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America. His work can also be found in the Indypendent, Fellowship magazine, Truth-out.org, ZNet and Counterpunch. He is a founder of the local anti-imperialist collective Resistance in Brooklyn, working on issues of Puerto Rican solidarity, political imprisonment and the prison industrial complex.
Noor Mir is the anti-drone campaign coordinator for CODEPINK, an anti-war women's initiated grassroots organization with branches all over the world. She is based in the Washington, D.C. office, although she calls Islamabad, Pakistan her home. She graduated from Vassar College in 2012 with a major in Political Science and minors in French and Post-Colonial Literature. While studying abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 2010, she took courses focused on the intersections of international humanitarian law and targeted killing and was driven by her research to turn her work into a project on drone warfare back home in Pakistan. Noor then completed a year-long thesis on the links between theories of exception, lawlessness, Pakistan's tribal territories and drone warfare, with field work and organizing on the ground.
She is now running the anti-drone campaign for CODEPINK and is involved in youth outreach and student organizing, publishing campaign organizing manuals, managing the Network to Stop Drone Surveillance and Warfare and the website droneswatch.org. She is also launching the Global Drones Watch network and a summit with international activists in London for November 2013.
Rosa Moiwend is a West Papuan activist. She learned from her parents about her identity and the devastating impact of first Dutch rule and then Indonesian occupation on West Papuan identity and cultures. This destruction continues, as does the exploitation of West Papua’s land and resources. Rosa has worked for the human rights organization Justice and Peace Office of the Catholic Church (now the SKPKC Franciscans of Papua) documenting the daily violations of human rights and military oppression. She then lived in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand where she studied English and engaged in advocacy. In 2010, she went work for TAPOL – The Indonesia Human Rights Campaign in Britain. In November 2012, she graduated with a Master’s degree in Environment, Development, and Policy from the University of Sussex. Her work as a community organiser and educator deepened her involvement in the network of civil resistance movements in West Papua. Since 2010, she has been actively involved in the activist Pacific Nonviolence Network as an organiser and educator. She is also part of the campaign against MIFEE, the planned food and palm oil plantation in Merauke, Papua. More recently, she involved in the formation of the National Papua Solidarity (NAPAS), an Indonesia solidarity action network for West Papua, based in Jakarta. She is currently in the United States speaking and engaging in advocacy on behalf of West Papua.
Isabell Moore grew up in Greensboro, NC and is a long time activist around issues of racial justice, war/militarism and queer liberation. She is a proud member of Southerners on New Ground and Project South. In 2009, she received an MA in Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) at UNC Greensboro, where she focused her studies on issues of race, racism and movement building. After teaching history at a local community college for several years, she has now returned to UNCG to serve as the Program Administrator for the WGS program, where she enjoys helping students explore intersectional organizing and movement building through out-of-the-box internships, service-learning and events.
Luci Murphy is a native of D.C. where she is a vocalist who often leads group singing, but “sun-lights” as a medical interpreter of Spanish and English. She has a long history of community activism, especially working with children at risk. She has visited Lebanon to observe Palestinian Refugee Camps, China just before the normalization of relations with the U.S., Brazil for a grass-roots organizing conference, and Cuba to oppose U.S. travel restrictions.
A past president of the D.C. League of Women Voters, she has also served on the Steering Committees of the People’s Music Network, "Health Care Now!,” and Washington Inner-city Self Help. She has also been the convener of the Gray Panthers of Metro D.C., an associate producer of Sophie’s Parlor Women’s Radio Collective at WPFW 89.3 FM, the Pacifica Station in D.C. and contact person for the Community Coalition for Peace and Justice. Currently she sings with the SGI New Century Chorus and the D.C. Labor Chorus. In 2007, she received the Paul Robeson Award for Peace and Justice from the Friends of the People's Weekly World.
Luci has been performing since her childhood in the 1950s. To reach the members of our diverse human family, she sings in ten languages: English, Spanish, French, Creole, Portuguese, Zulu, Arabic, Hebrew, Cherokee, and ki-Swahili. She draws on the folkloric traditions and musical idioms of all these cultures, as well as her own roots in Spirituals, Blues and Jazz.
Catalina Nieto, Field Director, Detention Watch Network. Catalina has been active in the immigrant rights and Latin American solidarity movement for the past ten years as a community organizer, popular educator, interpreter, and artist. Prior to joining DWN in 2012, Catalina worked as an organizer for Witness for Peace and the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. Catalina received a B.A. in Sociology and a B.A. in Communications, Media and Theater from Northeastern Illinois University as well as a M.A. in Social Justice and Intercultural Relations from SIT Graduate Institute.
Thea Paneth is a member of Arlington (Massachusetts) United for Justice with Peace, a community-based peace group that she helped to organize in March of 2002. She was a "rank and file clam," spending twelve days detained in New Hampshire after occupying the Seabrook nuclear power plant site in 1977. Her writing on peace issues spans nearly thirty years and has been published in the Arlington Advocate, at Common Dreams, in Peacework, and in What Will It take to Prevent Nuclear War? Grassroots Responses to Our Most Challenging Question as well as many letters to the editor (Advocate, Boston Globe and New York Times). She is a parent, pacifist, painter and a non-violence trainer.
Vijay Prashad is the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon. His most recent book is The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso 2013).
A life-long social justice activist, Liz Roberts recently left her job as Development & Membership Coordinator at WRL and will begin Brooklyn Collegeís MFA Program in Creative Writing in the fall. Her poetry has appeared in Erasure, Liquid Sky, WeíMoon, and anthologies including We Have Not Been Moved (PM Press & WRL) and The Widows Handbook (Kent State University Press 2014). Collaborating with two other experimental poets, M. Mara Ann and Zoe Krylova, she wrote Cantle, Rubus and Oarlock, a book which addresses current peopleís movements and the necessity of remaining whole and human as we confront mass suffering and face economic and environmental peril. Her strident rhetoric and persuasive fundraising tracts can be found in countless unread emails, flyers, brochures, letters and peace and justice publications.
Mab Segrest is Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Connecticut College and has worked in social justice organizing for thirty years. She is author of Memoir of a Race Traitor that chronicled her organizing against Klan and neo-Nazi organizations in North Carolina in the 1980s. As a professor at Connecticut College for the past decade she has worked on countering rape and sexual assault and on creating more democratic and diverse spaces and processes. Her current research and activism focus is on mental health. She is working on a new book about Georgia's state mental hospital at Milledgeville.
Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons is a Senior Lecturer in Religion and African American Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her academic foci are on Islam and African American Religious Traditions. Her work in Islam focuses on Islamic law and its impact on Muslim women. She conducted research from 1996 to 1998 in Jordan, Egypt, Palestine and Syria on Fulbright and NMERTA Fellowships on the law’s impact on women, and on the women’s movements in those countries to change these laws. Simmons studied Sufism for seventeen years with the contemporary Sufi Mystic, Shaykh M.R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen in Philadelphia, Pa. from 1971 to 1986.
In addition to her academic and spiritual studies she has a long history in civil rights, human rights and peace work. For 23 years, she was on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC. Simmons was active with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming active during the Sit-Ins as a student at Spelman College from 1962-1964. She left college to work full time with SNCC in the summer of 1964 as a volunteer in Mississippi Freedom Summer, and went on to serve as the Project Director of the Laurel Freedom Summer Project for seventeen months working on voter registration, the development of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and building Freedom Schools in that community.
After her tenure with SNCC, Simmons became the Mid-West Director of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)’s Project Woman Power where she recruited and organized low-income women for Community Service in Chicago, Ill, Detroit, Michigan, and Cleveland, Elyria and Lorrain, Ohio.
Erika Slaymaker has been organizing with Decarcerate PA--a grassroots campaign demanding that Pennsylvania stop building prisons, reduce the prison population, and reinvest money in our communities--for almost 2 years. Erika studied Black Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College, where she co-organized the Queer and Trans Conference. Originally from beautiful Kentucky, she is a proud Southerner who also loves her new home in Philadelphia.
David Swanson's books include: War Is A Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), and The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012). He is the host of Talk Nation Radio. He has been a journalist, activist, organizer, educator, and agitator. Swanson helped plan the nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC in 2011. Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org Swanson also works on the communications committee of Veterans For Peace, of which he is an associate (non-veteran) member. Swanson is Secretary of Peace in the Green Shadow Cabinet.’
Sue Udry is the executive director of the Defending Dissent Foundation, which works to protect and advance the right to dissent in the U.S. Sue won her high school's “Best Citizen” award in 1978 and has been working to earn that title ever since. She played a leadership role in her campus peace group, and after grad school she began knocking on doors in neighborhoods around the country as a canvasser for SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, now Peace Action. Prior to joining DDF, she served as the executive director of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and as an organizer for the Coalition for New Priorities and the Day Care Action Council of Illinois. She was the legislative coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of over 1,600 groups opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sue currently serves on the board of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms and the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, as well as the Advisory Board of the Charity and Security Network. She is a co-founder of the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition and treasurer of the D.C. chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.
Lankan Tamil Blood, Manchester Born, Texas bred and Brooklyn steeped, YaliniDream conjures spirit through her unique blend of poetry, theater, song, and dance-- reshaping reality and seeking peace through justice in the lands of earth, psyche, soul, and dream. YaliniDream's work has been performed at venues such as NYC's Lincoln Center and New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop), Chicago's Vittum Theater, Manchester’s Contact Theater, and universities such as Yale (USA), University of Manchester (UK), Loyola College (India), and University of Peradeniya (Sri Lanka). She has facilitated workshops for war affected communities in Sri Lankan Refugee camps in Tamil Nadu as well as war affected communities in Mannar, Vavuniya, & Batticaloa (Sri Lanka). She was a long term volunteer with the Audre Lorde Project's SOS (Safe Outside the System) Collective in Brooklyn working to address homophobic and transphobic violence against people of color. YaliniDream is a recipient of the Jerome Foundation's Travel & Study Fellowship in literature and is a Spring 2013 Artist in Residence at the University of Michigan's Center for World Performance Studies. She is also a trained aerial dancer in corde lisse who loves to fly-- challenging notions of the seemingly impossible. YaliniDream recently returned from a tour in Cambodia, India, and Sri Lanka with Jendog Lonewolf.
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