[van-announce] Thurs Oct 21 @ Rhizome: Community & Resistance Tour: Struggles on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina feat. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha & Jordan Flaherty

[mia amir]

*Community and Resistance Tour*

Highlighting struggles on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, as well as
other social justice issues



Thursday, October 21, 7:00pm

Rhizome Café

317 East Broadway, Vancouver

www.rhizomecafe.ca



*The Community and Resistance
Tour*<http://communityandresistance.wordpress.com/>is an exciting
project organized by several book publishers and independent
media makers. The tour brings a multimedia presentation involving short
films, inspiring speakers, and exciting dialogue. Organizers hope to
communicate about current social justice struggles, from nooses hung in the
northern Louisiana town of Jena to women organizing inside prisons, from
battles around school privatization to post-Katrina community organizing and
cultural resistance. “This tour is for anyone interested in issues of health
care, education, criminal justice, housing, or the ways in which racism and
other forms of systemic oppression intersect with these struggles,” says
tour participant and author Jordan Flaherty.



Tour participants include: award-winning journalist Jordan Flaherty, who has
reported from the Gulf Coast for a range of publications, including the New
York Times, Al-Jazeera, and Huffington Post; and nationally-known poet,
organizer and author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. See below for more
detailed information on tour speakers.



Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Worcester raised, Toronto matured,
Oakland-based queer Sri Lankan writer, performer and teacher. She is the
2009-10 Artist in Residence and part-time professor at UC Berkeley’s June
Jordan’s Poetry for the People and the co-founder and co-artistic director
of Mangos With Chili, North America’s only touring cabaret of queer and
trans people of color performing artists.



The author of Consensual Genocide, her writing has appeared in the
anthologies Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize
This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous
Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World.
She writes regularly for Bitch, Colorlines, Hyphen, Left Turn and Make/Shift
magazines.  The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence
Within Activist Communities, which she co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai
Dulani, will be published by South End Press in March 2011. Her second book
of poetry, Love Cake, and first memoir, Dirty River, are forthcoming. She
frequently travels the country teaching and performing.



Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and community organizer based in New
Orleans.  He was the first journalist with a national audience to write
about the Jena Six case, and played an important role in bringing the story
to worldwide attention. His new book isFLOODLINES: Community and Resistance
from Katrina to the Jena Six, and audiences around the world have seen the
news segments he’s produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy
Now. Jordan has appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio
shows, including CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, Grit
TV, and both local and nationally-syndicated shows on National Public
Radio. As a white southerner who speaks honestly about race, Jordan Flaherty
has been regularly published in Black progressive forums such as
BlackCommentator.org and Black Agenda Report, and is a regular guest on
Black radio stations and programs such as Keep Hope Alive With Reverend
Jesse Jackson.



For more information, contact Jordan Flaherty, (917) 346-3623;
neworleans at leftturn.org.