Walidah Imarisha

Walidah Imarisha is an American writer, activist, educator and spoken word artist. She is known for creating the phrase "visionary fiction."

Imarisha is co-editor, with adrienne maree brown, of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements.^[1] It is named after the legendary science fiction writer Octavia Butler.^[2] She also co-edited Another World Is Possible in response to the 9/11 attacks.

Imarisha is the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars (Drapetomedia, 2013).^[3] She also wrote a nonfiction book about criminal justice issues, Angels with Dirty Faces: Dreaming Beyond Bars (AK Press/IAS, 2016). It won the 2017 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. She was a member of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista. She appeared on Puerto Rican punk band Ricanstruction's second album, Love and Revolution. Her words have been featured in Total Chaos: The Art And Aesthetics of Hip Hop, Letters From Young Activists, Daddy, Can I Tell You Something, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, The Quotable Rebel, Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Butler, Joe Strummer: Punk Rock Warlord, Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, and Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency.^[4]

Imarisha was also one of the founders, and the first editor, of the political hip hop publication AWOL Magazine. She worked on the editorial board for the national Left Turn Magazine. She was the director and co-producer of the Katrina documentary Finding Common Ground in New Orleans.

Imarisha and Octavia's Brood co-editor Adrienne Maree Brown describe the term "visionary fiction" as follows:

Trying to imagine "a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism" is making a kind of speculative fiction. Organizers and activists work hard to create and imagine another world, or many other worlds, just as science fiction does. ^[5]

"We believe that radical science fiction" should be called "visionary fiction because it pulls from real life experience, inequalities and movement building to create innovative ways of understanding the world around us, paint visions of new worlds that could be, and teach us new ways of interacting with one another. Visionary fiction engages our imaginations and hearts, and guides our hands as organizers."^[6]

Walidah has taught in many places, including:

• Stanford University's Program of Writing and Rhetoric
• Pacific Northwest College of the Arts' Master's in Critical Studies Program
• Portland State University's Black Studies Department,^[7]
• Oregon State University's Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department
• Southern New Hampshire University's English Department.

She spoke in public all over Oregon as a scholar with Oregon Humanities' Conversation Project for six years on topics such as Oregon Black history, alternatives to putting people in prison, and the history of hip hop.^[8]

Walidah was a member of the board of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors for six years. She helped to start the Human Rights Coalition, a group of prisoners' families and people who used to be prisoners.