sorry to podcast this STPT

This week on STPT, Danielle Holland is joined in conversation with Nkem Ndefo. Ndefo is the founder and president of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit, a model that promotes embodied self-awareness and self-regulation in an ecologically sensitive framework and social justice context. Together they explore adaptation, reclaiming resilience, and the joy of resistance. From transforming big and complex systems, to awareness in one's own body, Ndefo asks, when we are dismantling, what are we actually building?

"Letting the change be the gardener, the soil, the seed, the water, the fertilizer, the fruit, and the person eating the fruit. Every little bit is transformed in the act of changing." - Ndefo 

This week's episode reflects on bell hook's love ethic. By centering love, we practice it. With love, enjoy the show.   

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Licensed as a nurse-midwife, Nkem also has extensive post-graduate training in complementary health modalities and emotional therapies. She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, consultant, and community strategist to innovative programs that address stress and trauma and build resilience for individuals, organizations, and communities across sectors, both in her home country (USA) and internationally. Nkem is particularly interested in working alongside people most impacted by violence and marginalization.

This week on STPT, Danielle Holland and Puja Datta discuss the state of ever increasing abortion restrictions that have swept across the country over the past year. They break down who these laws most affect, what the dangerous impacts are, and what you can do to help financially or in volunteer action to support those seeking to obtain access to health care, either in rural states or for traveling across state lines. 

Then they are joined by philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Táíwò is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, working on social political philosophy. His book, Reconsidering Reparations: Worldmaking in the Case of Climate Crisis, connecting climate justice and racial justice, comes out this fall via Oxford University Press. (More at Olufemi) 

Together they dive into reparations as a worldmaking project in response to racial injustice. Addressing what reparations should accomplish towards changing the global social structure, they tie in labor, climate justice, migration and land back as core issues. 

Come worldmake with us in our post f***s society. Power concedes nothing without a demand.

This week on STPT, Danielle Holland and Bryan Barnett II hold conversation with writer, pleasure activist and filmmaker, Junauda Petrus-Nasah. Centering the conversation on Junauda's The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, they explore the deep potency, possibility and melancholy within adolescence. Junauda shares her experiences in writing with care, compassion and cognizance towards healing before and on the written page. From asking what abolition within oneself actually feels like, to slipping into liminal spaces of queer desire, this weeks episode is dedicated to all of the rest of you pleasure activists. Stay hydrated, rest well, m********e, and enjoy. 

Junuada is a writer, a soul sweetener, runaway witch, and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born and working on unceded Dakota land in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt a Black, experimental healing art collective. She is currently working on her second novel, set in the 90s about a young, Black woman training in circus. 

This week on STPT, Danielle Holland and Puja Datta discuss the media outpour and allocation of local, national and federal resources towards the tragic search for Gabby Petito. Taking in the larger national context of missing and murdered women, they share some key thoughts from their recent conversation with Roxanne White, nationally recognized for her work on issues related to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People. “Nobody is searching for us, except for us” White shared about the erasure, invisibility, and devaluing of #MMIW in this country. We invite listeners to support White’s work by donating to MMIP and Families at Unkitawa. 

Then, award-winning writer, geographer, and environmental anthropologist, Gina Rae La Cerva joins the show. La Cerva speaks to a reclaiming of ourselves as part of the wild, exploring how we can tend to nature and one another with support and connection. It is through this survival of connections, as we face a future of uncertainty, that La Cerva reminds us “We have to release this trauma, we have to start processing it. And it’s not individual, it’s always going to be collective.” Drop into this week's lush conversation, as they forage through capitalism, conservation history, and reconnection to pleasure. Let us all find our small joys in this f****d up world.

Gina Rae La Cerva is an award-winning writer, geographer, and environmental anthropologist originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico.  An avid adventurer, La Cerva has researched tsunamis in Indonesia, crossed the Pacific Ocean on a sailboat, and traced the wild meat trade from the forests of the Congo Basin to the streets of Paris. Her first book, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food was selected for the New York Times Summer Reading List, and chosen by Amazon as a Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020.

This week on STPT, Danielle Holland is joined by returning guest, Rokea Jones (she/her) to dive into TX SB8, reproductive rights and how adverse medical outcomes are inextricably linked to the experience of racism in the US. "We are literally fighting for our lives." Rokea shares specific ways we can give voice to the voiceless and be of service in this world. Rokea Jones is Director of Doula Services at Open Arms Perinatal Services, public service experts, and a maternal health specialist. Her diverse work experience over the years has covered providing advocacy, education, direct social services and extensive civic engagement and policy advocacy. 

Then, Anne Liu Kellor (she/her) joins Holland in conversation centered around Kellor's memoir debut, Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging, out now via She Writes Press. Anne and Danielle explore embodied states of love, inherited silences, and coming home to ourselves. From little t to big T Trauma, dissolving shame, and sharing the conflicts of her mixed race experiences, Anne offers herself to be seen in her multitudes as an inspiration to us all. Ride with us this week, in the Heart Radical.

Anne is a mixed-race Chinese American writer, editor, and teacher. Her essays have appeared in Yes Magazine, Longreads, Fourth Genre, Witness, New England Review, Entropy, The Normal School, Los Angeles Review, Literary Mama, and many more. She is the recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, Seventh Wave, Jack Straw Writers Program, 4Culture, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. Anne teaches writing workshops and leads writing retreats across the Pacific Northwest. She also facilitates a year-long creative nonfiction manuscript program for women and nonbinary writers seeking mentorship and community. 

Danielle Holland, Moises Nuñez, Kimi Lee King and Maryam Arshad kick off this week with an STPT roundtable. Diving into definitions of the self within the context of community and humanity, they explore language, accountability, and perception. These four question how to turn off the background noise and get into intentional alignment, all while flying high on Bowenian altitude training and soaking with generational trauma bath bombs™. For laughter, for love, and for your consideration.