Naomi Littlebear Morena is a Chicana lesbian writer and musician who is featured in the seminal third-wave feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Her song, “Can’t Kill the Spirit” has been adopted in protests internationally from England to Nicaragua.  In the 1980s, the Greenham Common Peace Camps adopted the song to protest the storing of nuclear cruise missiles, which lasted nearly two decades and was some 30,000 women strong. In her essay, “Tierra Sagrada: The Roots of a Revolution,” Cherrie Moraga names Naomi Littlebear Morena as a groundbreaking figure of Chicana feminism: “Since the early 1980s, Chicana lesbian feminists have explored these traditionally dangerous topics in both critical and creative writings. Chicana lesbian-identified writers such as Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldua, and Naomi Littlebear Morena were among the first to articulate a Chicana feminism, which included a radical woman-centered critique of sexism and sexuality from which both lesbian and heterosexual women benefited” (160).

Common Reading credit available.

Inés Hernández-Ávila (Niimiipuu/Nez Perce and Tejana), Professor, Native American Studies, UC Davis, is one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). Her research focuses on the interrelationships between autonomy, the arts, spirit, and social justice, through the study of Native American/Indigenous poetry, U.S./Mexico, with a particular focus on Chiapas. She is a poet, scholar, translator, visual artist, and a member of Luk’upsíimey/The North Star Collective, a group of Niimiipuu creative writers and language workers. She has received two grants to take a Luk’upsíimey delegation to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, to meet with Mayan counterparts, in Spring 2022. She has a contract with SUNY Press for the multi-lingual collection Donde Nacen los Cantos/Where the Songs Are Born: Contemporary Mayan and Zoque Poetry, featuring twenty poets in translation. She collaborated with the Library of Congress to produce the site La Palabra Indigenous Voices. Throughout her career she has been a bridge between Chicanx Studies/Chicanx community and Native American Studies/Native American community, and between Native writers in the U.S. and Indigenous writers in Mexico, Guatemala, and Chile. In April 2017, she received the Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award from the Latinx Studies section of LASA.

Common Reading credit available.