Surviving The Future

Shuli Branson is a queer/trans anarchist writer, translator, community organizer, and teacher. They were one of the organizers of the two UNC Asheville/Davidson College queer conferences that inspired this book. They translated Jacques Lesage de la Haye’s The Abolition of Prison (AK Press, 2021) and Guy Hocquenghem’s second book of essays addressing the May 1968 uprising in France, Gay Liberation after May ’68 (Duke University Press, 2022), for which they also wrote a critical introduction. Shuli is the author of Practical Anarchism: A Daily Guide (Pluto Press, 2022) and is currently working on a book on trans-anarcha-feminism. They often contribute to The Final Straw Radio, a weekly anarchist radio show and podcast.

Raven Hudson is an activist, writer, and researcher with a BA in English and Gender & Sexuality Studies from Davidson College where they cofounded the Asian American Initiative (AAI), coedited the student literary magazine Libertas, and helped create and host AAI’s Coalasian: A Southern Podcast. Their recent work centers on wounds and the melancholic subject within contemporary queer, Asian American poetry.

Bry Reed is a queer black feminist from Baltimore, MD, currently pursuing doctoral study in American Studies at Purdue University. She is committed to prison abolition, pleasure, and care work as tools for black liberation. Beyond her doctoral study, she is a writer, educator, and radical troublemaker.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is associate professor of gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012), focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war. Her following project is called The Promise of Beauty. She has published widely, including in Signs, Camera Obscura, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum. Her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University