2019-20 WILL*/WGSS Speaker Series

Audacious Voices: Celebrating 40 Years of WILL*

Fatimah Asghar
If They Come For Us: An Afternoon with Fatimah Asghar
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
4:30 p.m., Weinstein Hall, Brown-Alley Room
Part of UR Comes Out! 

Fatimah Asghar is a poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color, and she is the writer of If They Come For Us, a collection of poems that explores being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. If They Come For Us was named one of the top ten books of 2018 by the New York Public Library, and it was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She also is the co-editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender nonconforming and/or trans.

Chet'la Sebree
An Evening with Chet'la Sebree
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
7 p.m., International Center Commons
Part of the 2019–2020 Writers Series 

Chet’la Sebree is a poet, editor, and educator. She is the author of Mistress, a book of poems that presents a cross-generational conversation between Sally Hemings and a contemporary narrator about what it means to be Black women in the respective landscapes. Mistress won the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize. Chet’la holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. In fall 2019, she joins the Bucknell community as an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts. She is a 2010 graduate of the WILL* program.

Loretta Ross
Reproductive Justice as Human Rights
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
7 p.m., Jepson Alumni Center, Robins Pavilion
Westhampton/WILL*/WGSS Womxn's History Month Speaker

Loretta Ross is the co-founder and former National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. She is the co-author of Reproductive Justice: An Introduction and Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. Reproductive Justice, a term coined by African American women following the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, utilizes a human rights framework to look at reproductive oppression, sterilization abuse, immigration restrictions, gun culture, rape culture, the prison-to-school pipeline, and more. Her talk engages all aspects of Reproductive Justice, the primary framework being used to move beyond the paralyzing debates of abortion politics.