We hope this labour of love rises to meet you in resilience and across imaginative terrains of shared struggle & study. Sankofa Currents vol. 3, "Octavia's Seeds," from The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis is out now! Full PDF at bit.ly/CBPJournal2026 or linktr.ee/blackpoiesis ✨💜🙏🏾

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Glad it resonated with you. Previous Alchemy Lectures are no longer online, and this one will only be up another week, but I highly recommend checking out all three books from this wonderful lecture series (in US, from Duke Press). And we can expect a book of this year's lectures in 2026. 🫶🏾📚

Happy birthday to our beloved @prisonculture.bsky.social, whose imaginings, intentions and invitations have accompanied countless of us on our journeys towards abolition. She's fundraising for EVlovesNYC to help feed neighbors; pitch in along with me! evloves.networkforgood.com/projects/224...

So so proud to share the latest pub from the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis: Sankofa Currents, vol. 2 - "Ngũgĩ’s Gourd." The issue reviews our recent collabs and future. Thrilled for what our team & community continue to build. Please read & share: bit.ly/CBPJournalF25 #BlackStudy #BlackPoiesis

Ya rab keep the people safe

So so proud to share the latest pub from the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis: Sankofa Currents, vol. 2 - "Ngũgĩ’s Gourd." The issue reviews our recent collabs and future. Thrilled for what our team & community continue to build. Please read & share: bit.ly/CBPJournalF25 #BlackStudy #BlackPoiesis

✨The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis is "sharpening our oyster knives," preparing our imaginations and relations, with new + ongoing programs in Black study & collective practice during the 2025–26 year. Details: linktr.ee/blackpoiesis & IG (@blackpoiesis).+ Come thru, reach out, stay tuned ✨

You don’t have to be serious all the time but you should understand serious things are happening everyday as a result of words.

✨The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis is "sharpening our oyster knives," preparing our imaginations and relations, with new + ongoing programs in Black study & collective practice during the 2025–26 year. Details: linktr.ee/blackpoiesis & IG (@blackpoiesis).+ Come thru, reach out, stay tuned ✨

Make the Quiet Part Loud Again 2025

📖Just out from @dukepress.bsky.social>> Thinking across the U.S. and Europe BEYOND SANCTUARY critically examines liberal democratic policies of sanctuary and asylum and foregrounds migrant movements, those that demand a world beyond borders>> challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/2025/08/20/b...

Limited (Extended) Call for Contributions to Transnational Black Studies (Liverpool UP) by August 15th. Please note wide-ranging areas on p.2 & share especially to non-Anglo / non-Western Black + Afro-Indigenous scholars, writers, etc. who you admire and have a lesson or a word for future scholars.

Limited (Extended) Call for Contributions to Transnational Black Studies (Liverpool UP) by August 15th. Please note wide-ranging areas on p.2 & share especially to non-Anglo / non-Western Black + Afro-Indigenous scholars, writers, etc. who you admire and have a lesson or a word for future scholars.

I summarize here how DOD interprets the limits of federal troop authority in LA (as best as possible given the volumes on text on this topic), from restrictions on surveillance, interrogation, and other cop-like behavior, to exceptions for "extraordinary" emergencies and "private capacity" conduct.

Reminder that the current configuration known as ICE officially founded in March 2003. If it were a person, it could’ve had its first (legal) drink just last year in the US. I have shoes older than ICE. We know that soles can’t be replaced if they no longer exist—or never did 🗑️ Have a good weekend.

Gaza is close to hearts & actions worldwide. Solidarity @freedomflotilla.bsky.social & others from land + air show us Gaza & Palestinian lib. are physically close, too. What might the world hold in 7 days? Freedom flotilla comrades are exceptional. They don’t need to be the exception. #EndtheSeige

Nottoway’s Cousins (2025)

Sometimes people say “this too shall pass” but they don’t specify it’ll pass like a kidney stone does.

Proximity to power has academia & the 4th estate in service to authoritarian empire. They distort our relationship & access to material resources, evidence, knowledge, and replace it with violence. Shoutout to students of the world—permitted to graduate or not, for calling us into global account.

May 13th 1985: Philly police bombed MOVE org + two city blocks. Tree (12) & Delisha (14) Africa’s remains still used in classes at UPenn & Princeton Now: tanks, Cop Cities, ICE human traffic ops. Authoritarian violence starts w/ poor, Black, Indigenous, disabled folks—& expands if we refuse witness

there’s currently 22 items that are under $30, which can provide Gazans a few days worth of Internet. don’t miss Cynthia Dewi Oka's A Tinderbox in Three Acts or Lea Taranto’s A Drop in the Ocean, which were recently added :) tinyurl.com/authors4esims #ConnectingGaza

Awoken to new deaths among bio fam + close kin every day this week. Global regimes & deathscapes thieve the scales of grief. What could hold genocides, ongoing pandemics, untold disappearances, sudden illness? It’s too much. Heavy to be a living ghost in an alienating city of strangers—

May 13th 1985: Philly police bombed MOVE org + two city blocks. Tree (12) & Delisha (14) Africa’s remains still used in classes at UPenn & Princeton Now: tanks, Cop Cities, ICE human traffic ops. Authoritarian violence starts w/ poor, Black, Indigenous, disabled folks—& expands if we refuse witness

What ICE is doing is not deportation or detention. It's kidnapping. It's human trafficking, delivering individuals to companies/countries in transactions for financial gain. We need to upgrade our language. Words matter.

58 years ago, the mayor's father beaten & arrested by Newark cops::

We must see the alarming overreach in ICE’s *private* facility, subsequent arrest of Mayor #Baraka & underreach of Malta’s govt & military leaving humanitarians on #Conscience stranded at sea after multiple IOF bombings drones as connected. Incl. respective media responses parroting state rhetoric.

What’s done w/ actual ICE agents once the US regime falls is for folks more healed and enlightened to examine. Students & agitators of abolition are clear what to do with the *roles,* the still-expanding & violating positions that ICE agents & other police have been allowed to occupy, unfettered.

We must see the alarming overreach in ICE’s *private* facility, subsequent arrest of Mayor #Baraka & underreach of Malta’s govt & military leaving humanitarians on #Conscience stranded at sea after multiple IOF bombings drones as connected. Incl. respective media responses parroting state rhetoric.

1) You don’t need to be friends or even so friendly, but get to know your neighbours, by name. 2) Get to know the difference btwn. your purpose on this earth, and what you do to make money. Try your best to keep your values aligned with the former, even if it means you risk losing the latter.

The more I think about this the madder I get. Absolutely cooked.

This is CRUCIAL legal context for the assault by ICE on Members of Congress today. ICE has NO LEGAL AUTHORITY to prevent members of Congress visiting facilities to exercise oversight. There’s isn’t even a requirement to give prior notice of a visit. (H/T Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on X) 👇

Not to get too meta, but this misreporting stems from conflating political theatre with “protest." If a Mayor or Congressperson wants to protest, they can use the powers of their office—granted by the PEOPLE—to act. People protest the state. State actors are *meant* to work for the people. Focus up.

Have you read "Power" by Audre Lorde? Written June 1973, also in NYC (Queens). 5yrs & 2 days before Miller's murder by police, undercover cop Thomas Shea was acquitted by a jury of 11 whites + 1 Black woman who said “They convinced me,” after they absolved Shea of 10yr old Clifford Glover's murder.

Have you read June Jordan's "Poem about Police Violence"? Written 47 years ago, almost to the month, following the police murder of Arthur Miller by chokehold in Brooklyn, June 1978. She reads it aloud here: mps.lib.harvard.edu/sds/audio/44....

Rümeysa Öztürk was ordered released by a federal judge in the latest setback for the Trump administration's effort to deport noncitizen activists it accuses of antisemitism.

This Rümeysa Öztürk hearing is radicalizing. I've been a court reporter for many years, and I've never covered anything like this: A student deeply committed to her studies, imprisoned solely over writing an op-ed, being made to testify under oath for her own freedom. Dark, dark stuff.

STATEMENT "Trump's firing of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden is an untoward use of presidential power," said Daniel Schuman, Exec. Dir., American Governance Institute. "Dr. Hayden heads a legislative agency, and Congress should make that call. That unofficial arrangement should be made law."

Columbia bylaws state that the president can only send police on campus to arrest protestors after consulting with the university senate. Once again, the president has neglected to follow these rules, which have been in place since 1968.

🚨 Excited to launch Shared Horizons: The Politics & Poetics of Transnational Abolition, a living digital archive envisioned by @v_e_thompson & @essaysmythe. Learn & contribute to transnational groups dedicated to ongoing liberation struggles beyond borders www.sharedhorizons.org🌹💪🏾📖

92 years ago today, the Nazis raided the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexuality, where the first study of trans people was conducted, and burned all of its contents. Fitting that today is also the day SCOTUS greenlights the project of the eradication of trans people from society in the US.

🚨 Excited to launch Shared Horizons: The Politics & Poetics of Transnational Abolition, a living digital archive envisioned by @v_e_thompson & @essaysmythe. Learn & contribute to transnational groups dedicated to ongoing liberation struggles beyond borders www.sharedhorizons.org🌹💪🏾📖

EU’s mercenary and military externalisation to North Africa + IOF drones roaming unchecked in int’l waters + Malta ignoring yet another ship in distress just off its coast = shared project of border imperialism. Colonialism across sea + sky. #FreedomFlotilla #FlotillaRescue bit.ly/flotillarescue

It is a wonder she is called #Conscience, a concept too heavy for heads of state who abandoned theirs long ago. Where they refuse to act, Conscience and its 30 humanitarian workers sails, delivering aid and solidarity at sea. #FreedomFlotilla freedomflotilla.org/2025/05/02/c...

EU’s mercenary and military externalisation to North Africa + IOF drones roaming unchecked in int’l waters + Malta ignoring yet another ship in distress just off its coast = shared project of border imperialism. Colonialism across sea + sky. #FreedomFlotilla #FlotillaRescue bit.ly/flotillarescue