Dazed | January 26, 2022

Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, discusses her new book An Abolitionist’s Handbook

“These 12 principles or steps are about goal setting. They are about understanding who you are and how to bring the idea of abolition to the forefront in your life and in the lives of others,” writes Patrisse Cullors in An Abolitionist’s Handbook.

Cullors is a New York Times bestselling author, educator, artist and abolitionist from Los Angeles, as well as co-founder and former Executive Director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. In her latest book, Cullors outlines how abolition became part of her day-to-day life and how you can do the same. The book is filled with personal anecdotes of Cullors navigating her way through America, how the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement informed her work, the struggles she experienced – such as daily death threats and doxxing – and the people she met along the way. It contains instructions on how to practice accountability, unlearn toxic behaviours, build intentional abolitionist communities and, of course, dismantle the prison industrial system.

Here, Cullors chats to Dazed about what abolition means to her, how we can allow space to make the process a joyful one, and how we can push the movement forward here in the UK. 

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PEN America | January 26, 2022

PEN America is honored to announce the Longlists for the 2022 Literary Awards. Our Awards are juried by panels of esteemed, award-winning authors, editors, translators, and critics. These authors are committed to recognizing their contemporaries, from promising debut writers to those who have had a continuous, lasting impact on the literary landscape. You can learn more about the 2022 Judges PEN America Literary Awards judges here.

The 2022 Literary Awards will confer over $350,000 to writers and translators. Spanning fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, essay, science writing, translation, and more, these Longlisted books are dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence.

Finalists for all Book Awards will be announced in January 2022. Stay tuned for more.

PEN/Jean Stein Book Award ($75,000)

To a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.

Judges: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Angie Cruz, Maurice Manning, Steph Opitz

The President and The Frog, Carolina De Robertis (Knopf)

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Self | January 25, 2022

Patrisse Cullors was effecting change in her hometown of Los Angeles long before she became internationally known as a Black Lives Matter cofounder. As an L.A. native, Cullors led multiple nonprofit organizations, including Dignity and Power Now, JusticeLA, and Reform L.A. Jails. In 2013 she and fellow organizers Alicia Garza and Ayọ Tometi created the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag after George Zimmerman was acquitted on all charges for the killing of Black teenager Trayvon Martin. In 2014, as protests spread across the U.S. in the wake of the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the movement became the international campaign we know today.

In 2020, Cullors was named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people and inked an overall production deal with Warner Bros. Studios. Last year she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Her latest book, An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World (out January 25), leans on her 20-plus years as an activist and organizer to offer sage advice for fellow changemakers.

Here, the 38-year-old activist shares some inspiring, practical advice with SELF on how to make a difference in the world—by starting with ourselves.

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BNC News | January 24, 2022

While many social justice advocates work within the established social structures to achieve gradual change, there are others who dare to advocate for a completely reimagined and radically different system all together. Penned by the co-founder and former executive director of Black Lives Matter movement Patrisse Cullors, “An Abolitionist’s Handbook” offers relatable teachings on the history of abolition and how it can be used in people’s lives as a source of collective care. She asks people to lead with love, fierce compassion and precision.

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Hot 97 | January 24, 2022

Activist Patrisse Cullors sits down with Ebro, Laura Stylez, & Rosenberg to challenge our understanding of care, breaking down how to change culture in the world, and how to share the ideas and have dialog with those who don’t believe.

Her book: An Abolitionist’s Handbook 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World is available Jan 25!

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Jemele Hill is Unbothered | January 24, 2022

Activist and artist Patrisse Cullors joins Jemele to discuss her departure from Black Lives Matter, the movement she co-founded in 2013. Patrisse shares how the constant barrage of right-wing attacks impacted her mental health, how she’s handled death threats and criticism from others within the black community. Patrisse also discusses her latest book, “An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World.”

Listen to the podcast on Spotify

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The Hollywood Reporter | January 22, 2022

Author of a new book on how to be a modern-day abolitionist, the L.A. native talks about how far-right attacks on her finances last year were attempts to "get me killed," how her stance on activism has shifted and the projects she has planned under her overall deal with Warner Bros.

There are few people in Los Angeles who straddle the worlds of political activism, Hollywood and art the way Patrisse Cullors does. A co-founder of Black Lives Matter — the movement that arose following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013, after he killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin a year earlier — she went on to write a best-selling 2018 memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, in 2018. “That was the height of when Black Lives Matter was being called a terrorist organization,” she says. Cullors also became a writer on the Freeform show Good Trouble that led to an overall deal with Warner Bros. TV Group in late 2020. That same year, Cullors — through her work as an artist, she has presented performance pieces at the Broad and Hammer museums — co-opened an art gallery, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, in a former convenience store in Inglewood.

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Grub Street | January 21, 2022

Over the course of his 28-year-long career the chef, cookbook author, and former opera singer Alexander Smalls has opened a string of Manhattan restaurants, starting with Café Beulah in 1994, that served what he called Southern-revival cooking. In 2013, he debuted the Cecil and a revamped Minton’s, the historic mid-century jazz club. (He is no longer involved in either.) Now, he’s busy with his most ambitious project: a string of African food halls called Alkebulan, including one in Harlem. For Smalls, hosting is what it’s all about. “That’s all a boy wants is a dinner party,” he says. “The rest of it, it’s a lot to go through just to host some people for dinner. But hey, we all have our ways to get there.”

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Dear Culture Podcast | January 20, 2021

Dear Culture, What does it mean to be an abolitionist? This week on the Dear Culture Podcast our hosts, Gerren Keith Gaynor and Shana Pinnock talk with Artist, Abolitionist and Black Lives Matter Co-Founder, Patrisse Cullors about her new book, An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and The World.

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W Magazine | January 20, 2021

In 2019, the activist, artist, and author Patrisse Cullors wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review that fused abolitionist history and theory with her own abolition practice. As a cofounder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation with years of experience working alongside at-risk youth, fighting for prison reform, and participating in social movements around the world, Cullors had plenty to say on the subject. But it was the first time the 39-year-old put on paper a step-by-step breakdown outlining the way she integrated abolition into her daily life. “I thought about what I would have wanted to see as a young abolitionist,” Cullors tells me on a recent phone call from her native Los Angeles. “I would’ve wanted to read someone say, These are the things that make abolition possible. So I said, Let me tell you how I do it.”

That article was the bones for what became Cullors’s latest book, An Abolitionist's Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World. Out January 25, the handbook is just that: a text that can be revisited as reference material for how to inject abolitionist theories into your life. Although An Abolitionist's Handbook contains instructions on how to enact Black liberation and the liberation of underserved communities; how to fight imperialism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and details on dismantling the prison industrial system and other harmful structures, it’s also imbued with stories from Cullors’s upbringing as a young Black woman in the United States, her experiences in the Black Lives Matter movement, and the lessons she’s learned along the way. Additionally, Cullors ends each chapter of the book by spotlighting other activists and associates who have inspired the way she approaches abolition today.

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Black Girl Nerds | January 19, 2021

Activists are too often romanticized as infallible beings who are naturally courageous as they take on grandiose missions. However, just like others — maybe even more than others — they are vulnerable and need to practice mindfulness, introspection, healing, forgiveness, and joy. They are human. They aim to build a better world while simultaneously becoming better people.

Advocating for a new world is draining work, yet can also be liberatory if the right tools are used. Fortunately, activist and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Patrisse Cullors has crafted the framework for activists to create an abolitionist future in her book An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World.

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Bust | January 18, 2021

L.A.-based author, educator, and activist Patrisse Cullors co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, and her 2018 memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, was a huge bestseller. Now, her new book, An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World, is poised to once again inspire readers to fight for a better future. Here, she shares how she gets her revolutionary words out into the world.

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Publishers Weekly | January 18, 2022

Cullors (When They Call You a Terrorist), a cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement, delivers an accessible if diffuse guide to “abolitionist practice.” According to Cullors, abolition “centers on getting rid of prisons, jails, police, courts and surveillance,” but also includes the fight for improved water quality in cities and a more equal distribution of streaming revenue for musicians (“If there is any part of your life where you are trying to get free, it connects to abolitionist practice”). She draws on her personal life and activist experiences to offer advice on how to have “courageous conversations” about difficult subjects, and how to “imagin[e] beyond the status quo” of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

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The Ringer | January 17, 2021

Bakari Sellers welcomes author of An Abolitionist’s Handbook and cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement Patrisse Cullors to discuss progress, or lack thereof, since the movement’s inception (6:00), the importance of 911 alternatives during a mental health crisis (14:35), and actionable ways to reform the U.S. prison system (18:37).

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Texas Library Association | January 11, 2022

The purpose of the Texas Topaz Reading List is to provide children, teens, and adults with recommended nonfiction titles that stimulate reading for pleasure and personal learning. It is intended for recreational reading and is not designed to support any particular curriculum. Due to the diversity in age range and topics, Texas librarians should consider titles on this list in accordance with their own local collection development policies.

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A Hip-Hop History (Young Adult Edition) by Jeff Chang & Dave “Davey D” Cook (Wednesday Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing, 2021)
A music and social history for hip-hop fans who are interested in understanding the origin of the genre and influence on American culture and politics.

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Harpers Bazaar | January 6, 2022

The daughter of parents who lived through and marched in the Civil Rights Movement, Stephanie Stokes Oliver was raised on the legacy of fashion as a gateway to a brighter political future.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, has an historic past as the site of the 1965 Bloody Sunday march for voting rights. What’s little known, though, is for years before that, after it opened in 1940, the town’s teenagers saw it as just another scenic background for prom pics and photo shoots on sunny Sundays. My mother, Josephine, around 16 at that time, was one of those who with her friends posed after church at the bridge.

Among our family’s treasured possessions is a fuzzy black-and-white 8-by-10 photo, taken, mounted, and signed by her own cousin Frank, just 20 days younger than she, as the budding photographer. Josephine is wearing a dark suit dress with white zigzag piping. Totally accessorized, she has on white gloves, is holding a flat envelope purse, and is wearing a turban that lends a sophistication beyond her young age. There are additional photos of that day with two other teenagers styling and smiling in a decades-old photo album.

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Food and Wine | January 4, 2022

Dubai's Alkebulan Dining Hall features 11 regional restaurants — and plans are underway to bring the concept to more cities around the globe.

"As a kid, I was told if I loved what I did, I'd never have a job," acclaimed chef, James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, and entrepreneur Alexander Smalls told Food & Wine recently. "I've never had a job. I've been able to create work for myself by following my passion and understanding the mission of my passion. And this is how we got here, if you will."

The "here" he's referring to is the grand opening of Alkebulan, the first dining hall in the world that showcases and celebrates African food. It opened in Dubai last fall as part of the pandemic-delayed Expo Dubai 2020, and it's also the realization of a vision that Smalls has focused on for well over a decade. "I've had five restaurants, starting with The Cecil in Harlem, all of which have been about the food of the African diaspora," he explained. "About six or seven years ago, I set out to create a destination that would tell the story of African food on five continents [and tell] how through slavery, Africans changed the global culinary conversation."

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Forbes | January 4, 2022

Only days into the new year, two major cities are slated to get even more delicious.

Harlem-based Chef Alexander Small, the James Beard award-winning visionary of The Cecil and its sister restaurant Minton's, is opening the world's first African food hall, Alkebulan.

Small, a former opera singer turned culinary activist, debuted the concept at Expo 2020 Dubai in October 2021. Following an extremely positive global reception, Alkebulan will remain permanent in Dubai, with expansions in both Harlem and London.

Alkebulan, which is the oldest name for Africa, is envisioned as a cultural and culinary movement that celebrates the untapped cuisine of the African continent. Smalls curated the Alkebulan location in Dubai to offer elevent African chef-led concepts showcasing the diverse cuisines that Africa has to offer, from gourmet dishes and street bites to fusion fare. Local art and live music also amps up the cultural immersion at the food hall.

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