adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual. Her latest book “Loving Corrections” is available from AK Press & wherever books are sold.
Through her writing, which includes short- and long-form fiction, nonfiction, spells, tarot decks and poetry; her music, which includes songwriting, singing and an immersive musical ritual; and her podcasts, including How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and The Emergent Strategy Podcast, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas, frameworks, networks and practices for transformation. Her work is informed by 25 years of social and environmental justice facilitation primarily supporting Black liberation, her path of teaching somatics, her love of Octavia E Butler and visionary fiction, and her work as a doula. After a multinational childhood, adrienne lived in New York, Oakland and Detroit before landing in her current home of Durham, NC.
adrienne is the author of Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry, The Journal of Radical Permission with Sonya Renee Taylor, (Berrett Koehler), Grievers and Maroons (the first two novellas in her fiction trilogy for the Black Dawn imprint at AK Press), Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, the NY Times Bestseller Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, the radical self/planet help book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds published by AK Press in 2017. She is also the co-editor of the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements with Walidah Imarisha, published by AK Press in 2015.
In 2022-2023, adrienne co-developed To Feel A Thing: A Ritual for Emergence (a musical ritual co-commissioned by OSF-Ashland and St Louis Rep Theater). She is on the team of the Lineage of Change Tarot Deck (AK Press, 2024) along with 16 Black oracles and artists weaving Octavia Butler and other visionaries’ wisdoms into the ancient knowledge of the tarot.
This is the work of a garden of visionary ideas for our extraordinary times. Only with nourishing and resourcing can the work grow as far and wide as needed. Each dollar we take in allows our lean and resourceful team to iterate and further the vision and tools adrienne offers as a revolutionary gift to our world.