Black Futures & Black Joy

Our future is BLACK and filled with JOY. This beautiful panel will take us on a journey of a Black future filled with joy, justice, art, and love. This event will be live-streamed to YouTube and will not be recorded. We invite you to reserve a ticket at the price point that works best for you and your circumstances. We look forward to your attendance!

Stacey Robinson is an Assistant Professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. He was a 2019-2020 Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research who completed his Masters of Fine Art at the University at Buffalo. For the last several years he has traveled internationally using his work to discuss ideas of “Black Utopias” as future decolonized spaces of reconciliation by considering Black affluent self-sustaining communities, the constitutions that governed them, the governments that destroyed them, and Black protest movements and the art that document(ed) them. As one half of the collaborative team “Black Kirby” with artist John Jennings, Stacey creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, lectures, and workshops that use world-building strategies to imagine new worlds inspired by Design, Hip-Hop, the Arts and Sciences, and diasporic African belief systems. His latest graphic novels are, ‘I Am Alfonso Jones’ written writer Tony Medina was published in 2017 from Lee & Low Books, and ‘Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre’, written Alverne Ball will be available in early May 2021.

Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy at Georgia State University. She studies Black historical excellence within educational communities with goals of reframing curriculum and instruction today. Dr. Muhammad’s scholarship has appeared in leading educational journals and books. She has also received numerous national awards and is the author of the best-selling book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is an award-winning associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on racial literacy in teacher education, Black girl literacies, and Black and Latinx male high school students. A sought-after speaker on issues of race, culturally responsive pedagogy, and diversity, Sealey-Ruiz works with K-12 and higher education school communities to increase their racial literacy knowledge and move toward more equitable school experiences for their Black and Latinx students. Sealey-Ruiz appeared in Spike Lee's "2 Fists Up: We Gon' Be Alright", a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou. Her latest books are Love from the Vortex & Other Poems and Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces (co-authored with Detra Price-Dennis). Visit with her on Twitter (@RuizSealey), IG (@yolie-sealeyruiz) or her website at yolandasealeyruiz.com.

*This event will be live-streamed to YouTube and will not be recorded. It will take place at 8:15PM EST, if you do not receive a post-purchase email please contact ominiramars@abolitionistteachingnetwork.org.*