Mwende Katwiwa Explained

Mwende Katwiwa, who performs under the name FreeQuency, is a Kenyan-American slam poet, community organizer, and activist.[1] Their poems address issues of identity, emotion, racism, colonialism, and police brutality in the United States. They live in New Orleans.

Katwiwa graduated from Tulane University in 2014.[2] They self-published a book of poetry, Becoming//Black, in 2015. They have also been touring the U.S. to perform spoken word poems since 2011. They gave a TED Talk in 2017 called "Black life at the intersection of birth and death."[1] They work for Women with a Vision, a nonprofit based in New Orleans. They also work with slam poetry and open mic organizations in New Orleans.[3]

They won the 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam.[4] At the poetry slam, Katwiwa performed "Dear White People" and "The Gospel of Colonization." Katwiwa also placed at both the 2015 and 2016 Individual World Poetry Slam.[3]

Mwende Katwiwa is active in the Black Lives Matter movement, reproductive rights and abortion rights activism, and LGBTQ+ advocacy.[5] Katwiwa is part of the New Orleans chapter of BYP100 and is involved with youth organizing.[6] [7] For example, they helped organize a protest march in 2014 regarding the killing of Michael Brown by police.[8] Although they were primarily involved with in-person organizing, they also used the social media site Tumblr to promote the protest.[9]

Katwiwa is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns.[10]

Bibliography

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Goughnor . Kara . An Interview with Poet "FreeQuency" . The Insider . . January 28, 2018.
  2. Web site: Johnson . Fawn . Hollander . Catherine . Washington, D.C.: Still a Tough Town for the Ladies . . July 13, 2012.
  3. News: Samuels . Diana . Poetry off the Page; New Orleans artist intertwines spoken word, activism . The Times-Picayune . November 13, 2016 . D01.
  4. Web site: Slam poet champion to perform Nov. 8 . Nebraska Today . University of Nebraska-Lincoln . November 1, 2019.
  5. Web site: Wilkerson . Emily . A Roadmap for Understanding . Tulane University School of Liberal Arts . . November 18, 2020.
  6. Book: Oliviero . Katie . Vulnerability Politics: The Uses and Abuses of Precarity in Political Debate . 2018 . NYU Press . 9781479838677 . 276–277.
  7. Book: Hogan . Wesley C. . On the Freedom Side : How Five Decades of Youth Activists Have Remixed American History . 2019 . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press . JSTOR . 9781469652474 . 134 . The Movement for Black Lives.
  8. McTighe . Laura . Theory on the Ground: Ethnography, Religio-Racial Study, and the Spiritual Work of Building Otherwise . Journal of the American Academy of Religion . June 2020 . 88 . 2 . 428–429 . 10.1093/jaarel/lfaa014 . Oxford University Press.
  9. Web site: Safronova . Valeriya . Millennials and the Age of Tumblr Activism . New York Times . December 19, 2014.
  10. McTighe . Laura . Theory on the Ground: Ethnography, Religio-Racial Study, and the Spiritual Work of Building Otherwise . Journal of the American Academy of Religion . June 2020 . 88 . 2 . 409 . 10.1093/jaarel/lfaa014 . Oxford University Press.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mwende Katwiwa".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2024, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.