How To Talk About Race, Class, Gender, and Ability

  Have you ever had your ant-racist beliefs questioned, and were unsure how to explain why you feel the way you do? Here’s a way to organize your thinking so you never have to feel “stumped” again.     JOIN MY NEXT CREATIVE WRITING CLASS!  

Poetry in Spaces of Recovery

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

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...

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

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

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?

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...

The Feminine Pronoun Series No. 32: #WRITERSRESIST

All over the country, writers assembled in vocal resistance to the rhetoric and planned policies of the incoming Trump administration. The movement was named #WRITERSRESIST. (You can find out more about #WRITERSRESIST here. In this video, my kids and I I travel to Millsaps College in Jackson, Mis...

5 LESSONS TEACHERS CAN LEARN FROM THE LIFE OF FANNIE LOU HAMER: #2.The Students Are Not Empty Vessels

One of my favorite photos of Fannie Lou Hamer is one of her in front of a mass meeting teaching freedom songs. Mrs. Hamer came from a spiritual tradition that included countless songs. Some of them can be heard on the album Songs My Mother Taught Me, and I often devote a portion of my interactiv...

The Feminine Pronoun Series: Poetry. Pedagogy. Justice. (No. 30)

The tagline on my website for Feminine Pronoun Consultants, LLC is “Poetry. Pedagogy. Justice.” Those three powerful terms almost encompass my life/work philosophy. I say “almost” because Parenting is also a major part of my life’s work, as it were, and each of the terms inform each other and tak...