Something Like Freedom: Reading Group

FREE + VIRTUAL

Something Like Freedom: Reading Group, organized in collaboration with Wendy’s Subway, is an intimate, virtual reading group where participants will build a personal and collective understanding of abolition & liberation. Participants will view and discuss short excerpts of critical texts – ranging across books, music, film and other media – selected by the facilitator(s). 

Though some materials may be provided in advance, this reading group does not require any prior preparation or background knowledge on any topics. 

Each session is a standalone session with different topics and materials; participants can register for one or multiple sessions. 

This reading group is facilitated by Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, with special guest facilitators Jadyn Fauconier-Herry (May 15), troizel (May 22), and Nicole Shawan Junior (May 29).

Space is limited and registration is required.

Please note: The Something Like Freedom Reading Group takes place over a Zoom meeting and is best experienced through the Zoom app. If you have a limited working knowledge of Zoom, please contact events@weeksvillesociety.org.

This program will be captioned using automated captions. If you require any additional accommodations, please indicate so in your registration and/or reach out to events@weeksvillesociety.org as soon as possible.

FACILITATOR BIOS

Jadyn Fauconier-Herry is a writer, researcher, and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is passionate about (re)connecting with the Black radical past as an avenue for police and prison abolition in the present. Jadyn holds a B.A. in Social and Cultural Analysis and English and American Literature from New York University, where wrote the thesis “Abolition Is…: Theoretical Origins and Departures of Prison Abolitionism and the Modern Prison Abolition Movement in the United States.” This project led to the creation of multimedia platform “Abolition Is…”, a political education resource which is dedicated to amplifying the tools to make the violences of prisons, policing, and surveillance obsolete.

troizel is black and alive and the queerness of this fact means much more than even these words can express. troizel is a PhD candidate in performance studies at nyu, currently writing a dissertation entitled black performance studies: queer/trans experiments.

Nicole Shawan Junior (Smith College BA | Pace University MST | Temple University JD) was born and bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. They are a Black, queer, poverty born, and femme-boiyant counter-storyteller, and femme-inist. Nicole is the Founder & Executive Director of Roots. Wounds. Words., a literary arts revolution that provides pedagogy, performance and publication opportunities to BIPOC storytellers. They are also the Deputy Director of PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing, a program that amplifies and supports the narratives of writers who happen to be incarcerated. Nicole’s writing is anthologized in The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket 2022) and Emerge: A Lambda Literary Anthology (Lambda Literary 2020), and appears in numerous platforms. Nicole not only works to destigmatize and remove the shame from what it is to be a felon, but they also put pen-to-paper to capture the journeys of around-the-block Black girls.

Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a writer and translator. She is the editor of ‘Dream of Europe: selected seminars and interviews: 1984-1992’ (Kenning Editions, 2020); a selection of lectures by Audre Lorde held across Western Europe. Rodríguez is a former Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The John F. Kennedy Institute of Northamerican Studies (Freie Universität Berlin, 2018). Her writing appears in Social Text Journal, The Poetry Project and South As a State of Mind among others.