Join Critical Resistance for Dreaming Wildly, Fighting to Win. This event will feature a rare West Coast appearance by acclaimed poet Martín Espada in conversation with Angela Y. Davis and will be moderated by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde. Dreaming Wildly, Fighting to Win will encourage audience members to envision a world free of the prison industrial complex and inspire us to take steps toward making those visions real. Espada and Davis will be joined by other culture workers and movement leaders to lift up the spirit of liberation and self-determination. All proceeds will benefit Critical Resistance.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2013 – 7PM
SCOTTISH RITE CENTER
1547 LAKESIDE DR.
OAKLAND, CA 94612
About The Speakers
Angela Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position at UCLA because of her activism and membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970 she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on false charges. During her sixteen-month incarceration, a massive international “Free Angela Davis” campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972. Today Prof. Davis remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is the author of many books, including her most recent collection, The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues (City Lights Open Media).
Called “the Latino poet of his generation,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. He has received other recognition such as the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Robert Creeley Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His work has been widely translated; collections of poems have been published in Spain, Puerto Rico and Chile. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End Press, 1998), has been banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A graduate of Northeastern University Law School and a former tenant lawyer, Espada is currently a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
A member of the Oakland-based arts collaboration, Dignidad Rebelde, Melanie Cervantes is a Xicana activist-artist whose work includes black and white illustrations, paintings, installations and paper stencils. She is best known, however, for her prolific political screen prints and posters which have been used by movements across the globe. Employing vibrant colors and hand-drawn illustrations, her work moves those viewed as marginal to the center — featuring powerful youth, elders, women, and queer and indigenous peoples.