Walidah Imarisha is the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements. Imarisha is also the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption, which won a 2017 Oregon Book Award, and the poetry collection Scars/Stars.
She spent 6 years with Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project as a public scholar facilitating programs across the state about Oregon Black history. Imarisha has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford University.
She has facilitated writing workshops at schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women’s prisons. As part of the Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, she traveled for four years statewide as a public scholar facilitating interactive programs on prisons and alternatives to incarceration. Imarisha is one of the founders of the Human Rights Coalition, an organization of prisoners’ families with three chapters in Pennsylvania.
Praise For Angels with Dirty Faces
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“A brave, honest search for answers regarding incarceration.”
Kirkus Reviews
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“This is a bold, beautiful, and absolutely necessary book, written with urgency and passion.”
Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era
Praise For Octavia’s Brood
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“Those concerned with justice and liberation must always persuade the mass of people that a better world is possible. Our job begins with speculative fictions that fire society’s imagination and its desire for change. In adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s visionary conception, and by its activist-artists’ often stunning acts of creative inception, Octavia’s Brood makes for great thinking and damn good reading. The rest will be up to us.”
Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America