A historian at heart, reporter by (w)right, rebel by reason, Walidah Imarisha is a spoken word artist and aspires to be a revolutionary.
Walidah has toured the country several times performing, lecturing and challenging. She has facilitated poetry and journalism workshops third grade to twelfth, in community centers, youth detention facilities, and women’s prisons. The author of two chapbooks, children of ex-slaves: the unfinished revolution and This Back Called Bridge. Walidah is also the bad half of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista, and has co-authored with her partner Turiya Autry two chapbooks: Good Sista/Bad Sista: Can YOU Tell the Difference? and Action-packed!.
She has shared the stage with folks as different as Kenny Muhammad of the Roots, Chuck D, Saul Williams, war resister Stephen Funk, Ani DiFranco, John Irving, dead prez and organizer and revolutionary Yuri Kochiyama. She has appeared on Puerto Punx band Ricanstruction’s second album Love and Revolution and toured nationally and internationally with them.
Walidah was one of the editors for the first anthology to be released about Sept. 11 and the aftermath, Another World is Possible, and has had her words featured in Total Chaos: The Art And Aesthetics of Hip Hop, Letters From Young Activists, Daddy, Can I Tell You Something, Revolution She Wrote, Word Warriors, and The Quotable Rebel.
One of the founders and first editor of the political hip hop publication AWOL Magazine, Walidah spent six years on the board of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. She helped to found the the Human Rights Coalition, a group of prisoners’ families and former prisoners with three chapters in Pennsylvania.
Lastly, she is also the director and co-producer of the Katrina documentary Finding Common Ground in New Orleans and went on a west coast tour in May 2007 with the film and New Orleans organizer Suncere Ali Shakur.
Walidah also hates writing bios with a passion, and knows that concerted consistent and real organizing work is way more important than all this other ego pumping shit. But hey, we still live in a capitalist society where you gotta pay the bills, right? At least for now (evil yet still revolutionary laugh).
