Year: 2017

Poetry in Spaces of Recovery

Posted on by treasureshieldsredmond
  I love the photo above because you can’t tell which hand is mine. Just like if I was standing together with these women in the Magdalene house, a safe place for women recovering from addiction and a life in the sex trade, (whether being trafficked or deploying their labor in instances of surv...

The Black Skillet or How To Fund The Arts With Soul Food

Posted on by treasureshieldsredmond
On September 16, 2017, from 6pm to 9pm at the Yeyo Arts Collective (2907 S Jefferson Ave, St. Louis, MO 63118), the Black Skillet Funders’ inaugural quarterly dinner happened. We served our favorite African, African-American, Black, and Southern traditional foods to members, artists and the pub...

The Birth of The Who Raised You? Podcast (Pt. 1)

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I’m launching a podcast with my friend Karen Yang! (Video Below) Here’s a bit more about it: Who Raised You? Podcast is a kitchen table conversation between Karen (Jia Lian) Yang and Treasure Shields Redmond. Karen (she/her/they) is a 26 year-old bisexual 2nd generation Taiwanese American and a t...

Why A Black Woman Named Fannie Lou Hamer Matters Now More Than Ever (BONUS: Audio!)

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Who was Fannie Lou Hamer? When one thinks of the millions of souls lost during the transatlantic slave trade, the missed potential immediately jumps to mind. All genocide robs us of the few geniuses that each culture produces.  At the beginning of the previous century the pernicious system named...

TFW You Realize You’re In Love With Your Captor

Posted on by treasureshieldsredmond
Sometimes I feel as if black folk’s self-worth teeters on the impetuous and hateful razor’s edge of racist white institutions. Like the protagonist in Beauty and the Beast, we’ve fallen in love with our captor, and somehow it has become our responsibility to humanize him. I have now lived thr...

Vlog: The Feminine Pronoun Series: “I Contain Multitudes” (No. 34)

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I titled this video “I Contain Multitudes, “as a nod to poet Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I love the poem because it is an expansive celebration of the visceral kingdom, the body, pleasure, our mortal reality, and the justice of seeing everything as part of a converging whole. I like to think...

5 LESSONS TEACHERS CAN LEARN FROM THE LIFE OF FANNIE LOU HAMER: #5.The Writing Classroom is Uniquely Suited for Finding Undiscovered Gems

Posted on by treasureshieldsredmond
In part four of this series – “Our Classrooms Benefit from the Voices of our Most Marginalized Students” — I discussed (partly) how valuable the “marginalized voices” are in our classrooms. But really, I was speaking to the notion that the “marginalized” is the majority. I encourage you...

The National Women’s March: Sisters, What Are You Willing To Destroy?

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What follows are the remarks and the poem (“Oath: 1957”) I delivered on Saturday, January 21, 2017 at the St. Louis arm of the National Women’s March. When I was first asked to participate in the national women’s March, I declined because I thought it was just another example in the long line of...