Erika Dickerson-Despenza

Erika Dickerson-Despenza is a New Orleans-based Blk radical leftist poet-playwright and womanist cultural memory worker. Afrosurrealism, magical realism, narrative re/memory, kinesthetic imagination and Black queer women's interiority and erotic fugitivity are conceptual preoccupations of her work. Erika's primary thematic foci are Black land legacies, Black apocalyptic ritual and environmental racism. Her work occupies sites of intimate reckoning, situating rupture in traditionally sacred or “safe” spaces to make invisible systems of environmental oppression and cultural trauma visible and ultimately ask us to consider abolitionist political ecologies.