Welcome to a new year of love and struggle.

We closed out 2020 co-facilitating several workshops hosted by the #DefundCPD campaign. It was an unprecedented year for abolition, and the mainstreaming of the demand to defund the police and prison systems and reallocate resources to the social programs that actually keep us safe. If you live in Chicago, you need to be supporting this campaign and the struggle to abolish our police department! If you live elsewhere, follow #DefundCPD and uplift its messaging in your own town or city.

We’re kicking off the new year by looking back on the old one. We’ll participate in a virtual poetry reading on January 8th for the Signs of Change exhibit opening, hosted by the Gallery of Contemporary Mosaics, alongside other poets and artists such as Elizabeth Marino, Cori Lin, and Natalia Virafuentes. The show displays signs, banners, and other visuals from the global uprisings that occurred over the course of 2020. We’ll be reading our poem Layleen’s Bill (With Revisions) in honor of the Black trans lives we lost this year, but also in acknowledgement of the unparalleled developments in the movements to end solitary confinement, defund police, and abolish prisons.

We’ll also be reconnecting with our friends at The Funambulist. We first worked with the Paris-based magazine when they came to Chicago in 2019 as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2021, we’ll be writing two essays for them, representing Chicago alongside 25 other global cities as part of their Correspondents series. Keep an eye out!

While the struggles of 2020 continue into the New Year, we hope to see them flourish and expand in ways unpredicted. Stay posted here as our own work shifts and evolves in this next chapter.

BH