Our Leadership
Community-based leadership defines the historic model upon which Fire & Inkwell expands and is critical to how we will strengthen the organization’s capacity to sustainably scale.
As we rebuild, we will avoid the significant personal cost to community leaders that has so seriously limited historical organizational capacity. Instead, we will continue to build and strengthen leaders from within the community.
Jafari Allen
Jafari Sinclaire Allen is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) at Columbia University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), and Editor-in-Chief of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Society, and Culture. His latest book, There’s a disco ball between us: a theory of Black gay life was published by Duke University Press in 2022. A social-cultural anthropologist and critical ethnographer by doctoral training, Dr. Allen’s work pursues generative connections and disarticulations among anthropology, feminist and queer studies, and Black studies, through a re-signification of the methodologies, theories, politics, and habits of mind of each of these sites. Professor Allen is also the author of ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba; editor of Black/Queer/Diaspora; and “The Anthropology of ‘What is Utterly Precious’: Black Feminists, Black Queer Habits of Mind, and the ‘Object’ of Ethnography.” He wrote the new introduction (“Crucial Palimpsest: Re-Reading Brother to Brother”) to Brother to Brother: New Writings By Black Gay Men, originally edited and introduced by Essex Hemphill, and a number of other publications.
Samiya Bashir
Samiya Bashir is a prolific poet, artist, writer, performer, educator, and advocate. A long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Samiya was a founding organizer and longtime Board member of Fire & Ink, a nonprofit devoted to increasing the understanding, visibility, and awareness of the works of LGBTQ+ writers of African descent and heritage. Samiya is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her first book was published by Third World Press, the oldest independent publisher of Black literature, and she was later one of the first poets to be published by RedBone Press, where publisher Lisa C. Moore has been dedicated to raising the voices of Black LGBTQ+ authors for 25 years. Samiya herself is also a two-time Lambda Literary Awards finalist. Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and the New York Council on the Arts, among numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies. In addition to her books, Samiya has served as editor to national magazines and anthologies of literature and artwork. Bashir lives in Harlem.
Cheryl Clarke
Cheryl Clarke’s books of poetry include By My Precise Haircut (The Word Works Press, 2016); Experimental Love (Firebrand Books, 1993), which was nominated for a 1994 Lambda Literary Award; Humid Pitch: Narrative Poetry (Firebrand Books, 1989); Living as a Lesbian (Firebrand Books, 1986); and Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983). Her poems and essays have also appeared in numerous anthologies, including The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Alyson Publications, 1992), edited by Joan Nestle. Clarke has read her poetry and spoken at venues throughout the United States. She has also served as member of the editorial collective for Conditions magazine. Clarke is the director of the Office of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian-Gay Concerns at Rutgers University. She is also the co-organizer of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers held annually in Hobart, New York, where she lives.
Alexis DeVeaux
Alexis De Veaux, PhD, is a black queer feminist independent scholar whose work in multiple genres is internationally known. Born and raised in Harlem, New York City, she is published in five languages-English, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian. Over the past five decades her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, most recently in Mouths of Rain, An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (ed. Briona Simone Jones, 2021). De Veaux is the author of the memoir Spirits In The Street (1973); the biography-in-prose, Don’t Explain, A Song of Billie Holiday (1980); Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Poems and Drawings (1985, reprinted 2023, Sinister Wisdom). De Veaux also authored Warrior Poet, A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004). The first biography of the pioneering lesbian poet, Warrior Poet won several prestigious awards including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005), the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Outstanding Book Award (2004), and the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Biography (2004). Her novel, Yabo, was published by Redbone Press (2014) and was awarded the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Her latest work, JesusDevil, The Parables was published by AK Press in the spring of 2023.
Torkwase Dyson
Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives, seeking to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies. Dyson builds the paintings slowly, accumulating washes, building surface, and configuring minimal geometric elements that lend a productive tension between image and object. The paint-handling producing various visual qualities using brushwork and other tools is made poetic by a juxtaposition of delicate marks and scored diagrammatic lines. This compositional rigor imbues the works with an architectural presence and optical gravity. Dyson considers spatial relations an urgent question both historically and in the present day. Through abstract paintings, Dyson grapples with ways space is perceived and negotiated. Explorations of how the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through natural and built environments become both expressive and discursive structures within the work.
Steven G. Fullwood
Steven G Fullwood is an archivist, visual artist, and coordinator for the exhibition, “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Fullwood is the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project, an initiative that partners with organizations, institutions, and individuals to establish, preserve, and enhance collections that explore the African Diasporic experience. Fullwood’s published works include Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call (co-edited with Charles Stephens, 2014), Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books (co-edited with Lisa C. Moore, 2007) among other titles. nomadicarchivistsproject.com
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Her most recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde insists that the scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe. Her award-winning meditation Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals offers a critical interspecies love song. Alexis is currently a Monument Lab Fellow and a Loss and Damage Collaborative Commissioned Author creating ceremony in honor of the wisdom of climate catastrophe survivors in the legacy of Audre Lorde.
Daniel Alexander Jones
Daniel Alexander Jones exemplifies the artist-as-energy worker. His wildflower body of original work includes plays, performance pieces, recorded music, concerts, music theatre events, essays, and long-form improvisations. He explores the esoteric and the everyday through his own distinctive dramaturgy. Jones’s critically-acclaimed pieces include Radiate (Soho Rep and National Tour; Black Light (Public Theater, Greenwich House Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Penumbra Theatre); Duat (Soho Rep); An Integrator’s Manual (La MaMa, etc. and Fusebox Festival). Jones has recorded six albums of original songs as his alter-ego, Jomama Jones. Daniel’s current project, www.aten.life, significantly expands his digital media presence. He has been a part of arts communities in New York City, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Austin, Boston, and Los Angeles, where he bases his practice.
Dawn Lundy Martin
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood , winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life , which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE , A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering , and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1 , The New Yorker , Ploughshares , The Believer , and Best American Essays 2019 . Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of African American Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
Ruth McFarlane
Ruth McFarlane is the Deputy CEO at the Ms. Foundation for Women, where she oversees the finance, operations, advancement (development & communications) departments and works collaboratively with the CEO, Chief of Programs and departmental leaders to guide strategic direction, extend the Foundation’s impact, and improve financial sustainability, operational integrity, and overall security. Ruth previously served as the Director of Development & Community Engagement at the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Director of Programs at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center. Prior to working in the nonprofit sector, Ruth practiced as an international tax and corporate transactions attorney at Linklaters LLP and Norton Rose Fulbright. Ruth holds a JD from Cornell Law School and an MSW from University of California Berkeley. She has served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including Health Access Foundation, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Homeownership SF, and City of Refuge United Church of Christ Oakland.
Ronaldo Wilson
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize., Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, Dixon Place, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Lousiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and co-directing the Creative Writing Program.