Joy DeGruy, PhD
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Writer, speaker, and social scientist
Dr. DeGruy is a world renowned writer, speaker, and social scientist with two master degrees in Social Work and Clinical psychology. Her doctorate degree is in Social Work research. Throughout her career, she has held numerous workshops and seminars and given lectures about her research focused on the intersection of racism, trauma, and American chattel slavery. Her book Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing shows its readers how the persistence of that intersection suffuses our daily lives. Indeed, Dr. DeGruy travels across the globe to share this message and has held these aforementioned lectures almost everywhere. She has graced her presence, time and thoughts with—Morehouse School of Medicine, Smith College, Stonybrook College, Harvard University, Tulane University, Everett Community College, Fisk University, Oxford University, the Essence Music Festival, and the County of LA department of mental health. She has also done consulting work with Oprah Winfrey.
Patrick Phillips
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Author, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
Patrick Phillips is currently a fellow of the Cullman Center for Writers at the New York Public Library, as well as a Carnegie Foundation Fellow. His first book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, was published by W. W. Norton and named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. Elegy for a Broken Machine appeared in the Knopf Poets series in 2015, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggennheim Foundation,
Phillips is also the author of Chattahoochee, Boy, and Song of the Closing Doors, which was published by Knopf in 2022. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. Phillips lives in San Francisco and teaches writing and literature at Stanford.
Patty Berne
Friday, November 3, 2023
Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid
Patty Berne is the Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid, a disability justice-based performance project centralizing disabled artists of color and queer and gender non-conforming artists with disabilities. Berne’s experiences as a Japanese-Haitian queer disabled woman provides grounding for her work creating “liberated zones” for marginalized voices.
Berne is widely recognized for their work to establish the framework and practice of disability justice which centers intersectionality and the ways diverse systems of oppression amplify and reinforce one another. As they explain, the disability justice framework was a reaction to the ways that the U.S. disability rights movement “invisibilized the lives of peoples who lived at intersecting junctures of oppression – disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others.”
Berne’s training in clinical psychology focused on trauma and healing for survivors of interpersonal and state violence. Their professional background includes advocacy for immigrants who seek asylum due to war and torture, community organizing within the Haitian diaspora, international support work for the Guatemalan democratic movement, work with incarcerated youth toward alternatives to the criminal legal system, offering mental health support to survivors of violence, and advocating for LGBTQI and disability perspectives within the field of reproductive genetic technologies.
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