Updates from Toward Liberation

Hello all! I wanted to send a brief note with some updates from me and connease. First, I hope you’re all as excited as we are about engaging with September’s book selection, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. As connease said in her post introducing the book last week, we know that our pursuit of liberation will take not only our continued efforts to fight and resist but also our ability to dream and create within the very challenging circumstances in which we exist. We also know that our ability to dream and create takes both intention and practice. To lean into this intention, we plan to spend the next several months engaged in conversations about the future - a future that will only exist if we can expand our minds to imagine all it can be and practice with intention to bring this future into reality. Many brilliant authors and storytellers have written about what this future might look like and we’re excited to begin to explore some of these incredible stories together.

We’re also excited about continuing our monthly zoom discussions with you. Over the past year, we’ve tried to find a consistent day of the month for these meetings to make it easier for everyone to remember. For most of this time, we’ve been meeting on the last Wednesday of each month. However, we’ve realized that sometimes this last Wednesday comes around very soon. For example, this month the last Wednesday is September 25th, which only gives us about 3 weeks to read. So instead, we’re going to begin holding our monthly discussions on the last weekday of each month, which this month will be Monday, September 30. I hope you’re able to join us! Just click the link below to register to participate and the zoom link will be sent to you. As always, we’ll meet from 6:00 - 7:00 PM Eastern.

Lastly, our very exciting update is that Maya Pendleton will be joining us at Toward Liberation! For those of you who aren’t already familiar with Maya, she is one of original founders of the upEND Movement and has been deeply engaged in the work of abolition for many years. Maya is also an avid reader and is going to bring much to our monthly selections and book discussions. She’ll also be contributing new blog posts and participating in our monthly virtual conversations. Stay tuned for her first blog in a couple weeks.

Until then, I hope you’ll keep reading Undrowned and sharing your thoughts. We’re very excited about all that’s happening at Toward Liberation and we’re looking forward to continuing on this journey with each of you.

Alan