Congratulations, @Yaliesaweda, on this incredible achievement!

A Sierra Leonean-American writer, artist, and scholar, Kamara graduated from Indiana University in 2018 and now serves as an assistant professor at Xavier University. She teaches courses in global and diaspora literature, creative writing, and hip-hop studies.

Congratulations to Yalie Saweda Kamara, a member of the Meridians Creative Writing Advisory Board and the 2023 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award winner for her poem "American Beech." Kamara has been recognized as one of Indiana University’s 20 Under 40 alumni honorees!

Read what we've been up to this past month in our September newsletter! 💜 -

End-of-Summer Newsletter 💜 -

Exciting News! Meridians Editor Ginetta E.B. Candelario will be speaking at the American Sociological Association’s 119th Annual Meeting on Saturday! Join plenary session, “Transnational Feminist Solidarities,” on August 10, from 12 - 1:30 PM ED: https://t.co/jj6niy2iC7 @ASAnews

Sociologist & Merdians journal editor Ginetta Candelario, from Smith College, discusses diverse methods & media used in the generation of feminist scholarship & creative output on the WPI podcast Crossing Fronteras: https://t.co/hrYmSx6bDK. @M3RIDIANS @smithcollege @wpi_lacs

Contributors to "Indigenous Feminisms across the World, Part 1," a special issue of @M3RIDIANS, explore forms and meanings of resistance and activist strategies within contemporary feminisms. View the full TOC: https://t.co/RmonCwDGam

To commemorate the last day of National Poetry Month, our #PoetryTuesday feature's our 2023 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award winner, Yalie Saweda Kamara. Be sure to check out her featured work in Meridians Volume 22 Issue 2!

"In doing so, it is proudly and sensorially Indigenous, as the performers reinvent Indignity as more than a subjectivity or source of ethnic pride, but as a force of decolonial subversion.” (pt.2)

“hijacks the notion of universal; humanity to make them singular with the non-Ainu bodies (or rather. Make the non-Ainu singular with the Ainu)" - (pt.1)

In her article, she quotes Alexander Weheliye, asking “Why are the formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemonic and/or exhibits the full agency of the oppressed?”, to which Tamura relates to her argument, stating that Ainu performance:

Many contemporary Female Ainu performance-activists from the Ainu community in Japan, engage in performance of desubjectification, which emphasizes the sameness of their humanity with the dominant Japanese rather than arguing for Ainu ethnic difference or their colonial history.

In our next “Inside the Issue” we will be highlighting Yurika Tamura’s ‘Rehumanizing Ainu: Performance of Desubjectification and a Politics of Singularity”, which argues:

Knobblock highlights Indigenous epistemes, the relationality and interdependency between land, humans, nonhuman beings, and the natural environment — are all foundational to the struggle against mining in Sámbe.

In honor of Earth Day, this #MediaMonday we will be highlighting “Rape of the Earth: Sámi Feminists against Mining” by Ina Knobblock. Published in our new issue Vol. 1, Num. 1, 2024: “Indigenous Feminisms Across the World”

For this week’s #PoetryTuesday, we are featuring Yael Valencia Aldana's poem "Open Your Mouth," which was published in our newest issue, Indigenous Feminisms Across the World (Pt. 1). Aldana is a Caribbean Afro-Latinx writer and poet. Link to the full issue is in our Linktree.

This year's winning poem is "Translations of Ba’s Recipe for COVID Prevention," by Winniebell Xinyu Zong. The winning prose piece is "The Ice Seller of Hell," by Maryam Ala Amjadi. We look forward to publishing both in a forthcoming issue. Congratulations!

Meridians will be celebrating Zeynep K. Korkman and Grace L. Sanders Johnson at The Meridians Project roundtable at The National Women’s Studies Association 2024 annual meeting held November 14-17, 2024, in Detroit, MI.

The honorable mention winner of the 2024 Paula J. Gidding Best Article Award for Meridians Volume 22 goes to Grace L. Sanders Johnson for their essay “Picturing Herself in Africa: Haiti, Diaspora, and the Visual Folkloric.”