SAVE THE DATE
TEXTURE, MEMORY & ECOLOGY OF THE BLACK SOUTH
A SYMPOSIUM & SISTORIES VOL. 2 LAUNCH
From the minds of the inaugural cohort of the Luminary Editorial Incubator, SISTORIES brings you the Fluid By Nature: Texture, Memory, & Ecology of the Black South Symposium.
Held at the Blumenthal Stage Door Theatre in Charlotte, NC, the event will be a day-long celebration of Black feminist thought and southern Black artistry that will showcase the art/work and study completed by the over the duration of the Incubator, featuring Issue V of the same name, a Black radical imaginative project curated by the cohort.
“What constitutes your Black Southern ecosystem? What textures, sights, sounds, designs, ecologies, and memories color or haunt your understanding of the South? What do the sky, the trees, the water, the body remember?” - from the submission call written by the LEI fellows
Hosted by LEI Program Steward and Guest Curator of Cultural Programs, Mariah M., Fluid by Nature will be a hybrid event made accessible both virtually and in-person. To be the first to know about event updates subscribe to our newsletter here.
Sistories is committed to making this event accessible to our disabled community members with diverse needs. Please refer to the venue's accessibility information https://www.blumenthalarts.org/venues/detail/stage-door-theater. If you have specific access needs to ensure you are able to fully participate, please contact our accessibility advisor, Ashley Robbins, at bullcitycommunitybiz@gmail.com or (919) 523-5753.
Besides abundant with Southern melanin, Jeané D. Ridges is a food-serenading, ecos-admiring poetic storyteller creating in the speculative expanse and sometimes this so-called reality while living with systemic lupus. They’re grateful for the space, together nurturing one another as well as our craft, offered by SISTORIES’s Luminary Editorial Incubator, Voodoonauts, Fellowship of the Griots, the Carbon Collective, Southern Esesu Endeavor, Roots. Wounds. Words., and who they affectionately claim as the Shenaniganders. They’ve been a copyeditor at khōréō since 2023 and became a poetry coeditor at Anathema: Spec from the Margins in 2025, loving both for the rich feltness and possibility traversed in their pages. Tales/verse and how to connect: jeanedridges.carrd.co | @jdridges (bsky).
Priya Dames (she/her) is a writer, reporter, and archives student. Inspired by the works of Black critics before her, she seeks to show how institutions become personal. Her work has been featured in The News & Observer, Science, and Triad City Beat. In addition to her essays and criticism, Priya writes short stories, which can be found on her newsletter, The Cocoon. She is a 2025 Winter Roots. Wounds. Words. Fellow in Creative Nonfiction. She is also the founder of the BIPOC Writing Group, a biweekly workshop at Scuppernong Books that hopes to provide belonging, camaraderie, and soft accountability to writers of color in North Carolina. Her work can be found at priyadames.com.
Brea (they/she) is a writer, scholar (PhD in Feminist Studies), poet, and lover of Black creative practices. My work navigates grief, memory, and the natural world to tell stories of not just survival but consistent connection. If trauma is the rupturing of relationships (to the self, the family, community, place, ect.) I see my work as slowly weaving thick ropes to pull these things in back close for myself and others. Working to imagine, write towards and organize for what’s possible beyond collapse and apocalypse, I firmly believe that we have already survived the end of many worlds and something else is always possible even if hard to get to. Even with these themes my work is also always about love in all of its formations.
Nina “Alex” Scott is an autistic, Afro-Carolinian-Caribbean, multimedia artist in Chatham County, North Carolina. In her work, Scott analyzes the collective unconscious through celestial hermetic archetypes, Black spirituality, and queer eco-feminist theory. By deifying the Earth and Heavens, Scott seeks to liberate nature, the Black body, gender expression, and neurodiverse minds from hegemonic oppression. Her work invites the viewer to recognize the ancestral power and spiritual resilience in embracing change, nonconformity, and neurodiversity.
For work, Nina is a graphic designer with experience in web, social media, and print design. Scott helped co-found Xpressions Magazine, UNC Chapel Hill’s first Black art and fashion mag. There, she directed shoots, sewed outfits, did makeup artistry, and edited the print design of the magazine.
Chinyere Erondu is a writer and steward of The Marrow Practice – a memory work and cultural archive practice centering Black feminist study, literature + interiority. Through Marrow, their recent work, Your Library as the Altar, invites participants to explore memory-work methods & seed their interior practices of re/building their (home) libraries as altar sites — through tending to their people & revolutionary guides + engaging with our literary canon as blueprints & nourishment towards strategy-building + collective liberation. Chinyere holds a Master's of Theological Studies from Vanderbilt Divinity School focusing on African-American & Diaspora Studies, and their work can be found at chinyererondu.com.
Jasmine is a Black queer southern writer, editor, and cultural worker. A lover of Black art and Black resistance, Jasmine is growing as a movement educator and historian. Creating possibilities for care and revolution drives much of their work, and you can often find them scheming in the kitchen or at the library. See more of Jasmine’s work at Jasmine-Butler.com.
Keynote Speaker
Assistant professor of English and Africana Studies, Davidson College
Dr. Randi Gill-Sadler (she/her) is assistant professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Dr. Gill-Sadler received her PhD in English and her graduate certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Florida. Her pedagogical and intellectual work sits at the intersection of Black feminist literary history, Anti-imperialist thought, and U.S. cultures of empire. In the classroom, she is committed to cultivating and nurturing reading practices that expose empire's entanglement with blackness and fortify Black, anti-imperialist literary traditions. Dr. Gill-Sadler is working on her first manuscript Diasporic Dissonance, which foregrounds Black women writers' anti-imperialist thought and critique of neocolonial inclusion during the Black women's literary renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. Her published work can be found in Small Axe, Feminist Formations, Radical History Review, and Oxford American magazine, and she has given publicly available talks for the Black Women Radicals youtube channel and the Millenials Are Killing Capitalism podcast.
Symposium Moderator
LEI Program Director & SISTORIES 2025 Guest Curator of Cultural Programs
Mariah M., or Em, (they/them) is a Black queer writer, cultureworker , and worldbuilder rooting in Greensboro, North Carolina (ancestrally Keyauwee & Saura tribal land).
As a practicing abolitionist, Em embodies non-binary as a praxis for navigating our lives under and undoing imperialism, and moves with their roles in community inseparable from their identity as an artist. By way of Toni Cade Bombara, they aim to use their existence to the ends of making revolution irresistible. By way of the cosmos, they are an Aquarius sun, moon + mercury, & Capricorn mars + venus. Learn more at mariahmcreates.com
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