TO THE BLACK WOMEN WHO ARE ALWAYS ON THE SHORELINE AND NEVER IN THE WATER
LIFE, LITERATURE AND BLACKNESS
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Meet The Authors
Glory to Mamas by Hughes Matumona
Iyana Robin
Iyana Robin is a Black Feminist teacher-scholar from Georgetown, Guyana and Newark, NJ. She was apart of the first graduating class in African American Studies at Wake Forest University and currently attends Georgia State University in pursuit of a Masters of Arts in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research tends to the durability of gender and slavery in the lives of Black femmes and insists on the act of Black Feminist speculation as a neccessary and radical shift to the existing world order. She believes our collective imaginaries are radical.
This passion for writing and teaching has been cultivated over various years in Iyana’s service work in Title I schools in North Carolina, the cofacilitating work done in collaboration with Rutgers University and the Brick City Voices Project in her home town of Newark, NJ (focuses on restoring black archives on Newark before the development of the Interstate highway system), coaching critical policy debate (as the youngest person to ever unite the crowns in collegiate debate) with focus on the intricacies of policy action and US governance on the lives of black femmes and their structural/ontological realities.
Trilogy Black’s journey begins in the summer of 2020 as it takes notice of and sits with the unthought violence of Black girlhood. It is Iyana’s hope that the work of black girls and femmes as well as the experiences that permeate their lives drive people to pursue an alternative relationship to the world, to the state, to violence, and above all else to black girls and femmes themselves. Trilogy Black is the space for that.
Cat Smith
Cat Smith is a Black and Native feminist, researcher and educator with roots in Malacatán/San Marcos, Guatemala and Chiago, IL. They were apart of the first graduating class in African American Studies at Wake Forest University with a minor in Communications. They were an active member of the policy debate team and volunteered their time to mentoring, teaching and learning with young Black and Native girls in the Winston-Salem/Triad area.
They are currently a debate coach and educator at several high schools and universities across the nation with a focus on teaching young scholars the importance of Black and Native study and how to produce a grammar for the conditions of their lives through critical policy debate. This focus allows students to understand the intersections of slavery, colonialism and conquest that shape governmental action and encourages students to imagine a different life than that which the imperial core demands.
They are invested in theorizing an intimate politic to feel and live through the broken Earth with a focus on the intersections of speculative fiction, geography, and the haptic. They seek to analyze the ways lines between the dispossessed are mapped through love, violence, spirituality and resistance through an erotic, queer and abolitionist politic. Their hope for Trilogy Black is to cultivate an intimate space for the dispossessed to live, breathe, and convene along these haptic lines.
