Richiena C. Brown

Richiena Brown is an Afro-Indigenous healer, writer and organizer. Her roots are also distinctly North Philadelphian as her grandmothers and grandfathers settled in North Philly during the early years of The Great Migration. The characters in her prose are often inhabited by these rich identities, paying homage to ancestral lands and centering the minoritized experiences of Black, LGBT and Trans folx, in particular. In her healing and community practices, Richiena specializes in trauma-focused healing, narrative expansion, uplifting subjugated stories of joy, strength and resilience, anti-displacement and community reclamation actions, and BIPOC and LGBT+ youth leadership development. Richiena describes her work as African diasporic root work, which relies on African-centered knowledge bases and radical imagination to individually and collectively decolonize and liberate our physical and psychic inner cities.