Advent Day Two: Find your voice.

This year’s PRESS Monthly Mantra calendar is a collaboration with student’s in MCLA Professor Frances Jones-Sneed’s class Women, Race and Society. The students, Frances and I responded to a variety of readings and writings centered around the Black Lives Matter movement by creating  calendars made up of quotes and images from notable figures from the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter movement and other movements centered around equality and justice. The student creations directly inspired and informed the quotes and designs for the PRESS calendar. 

Many of the students included quotes by Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde was a radical feminist, womanist and civil rights activist. She was a champion of intersectional feminism. I know her as a poet who addressed injustices in her own life and the world around her. She used words to incite conversation and thinking, modeling an introspection of herself that paralleled experiences of other women, especially African-American woman.

This quote became part of the image that we are using as our primary marketing look for the calendar:

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

But there are many other quotes that inspired me and the students to find our voices in our own lives. I’ve included some of them at the end of this post.

One of them will be on our new PRESS on the MOVE postcard of the month that will be available tonight at our PRESS Calendar Preview Party. Read more about that here.

Here are some of my favorite Audre Lorde quotes:

• When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
• It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
• If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
• I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
• Our visions begin with our desires.
• The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
• Revolution is not a onetime event.