Past Community Collaborators

2019-2020:

Mia Boykin and Marissa Houston

Coming of Age in East Oakland

Mia Boykin and Marissa Houston's project engages a group of middle school students at Bret Harte Middle School in the Dimond district of East Oakland, introducing them to a diverse body of texts geared towards youth. With its potential to construct positive identity formation and a sense of community, young adult literature is a crucial space for students to bear witness and give voice to diverse histories and stories. This is especially true for middle school students in Oakland, an epicenter of national conversations around gentrification, the housing crisis, gun violence, education reform, and criminal justice reform. Students at Bret Harte read and watched texts such as Into the Spiderverse and ultimately created their own coming of age narrative about life in Oakland. Students also facilitated a workshop on the Mills campus through the Mills Oakland Writers Workshop.

Alexandria Jones

Mills Oakland Writers Worshop: Raise Your Voice

Alexandria Jones curated a series of free community workshops on campus, facilitated by four Oakland writers. These workshops continued the tradition of on campus workshops organized by Clare Lilliston in 2018-19, while reflecting Jones’s unique approach. In person and virtually, each workshop had an average 15 and 20 participants. Each writer (or pair of writers) created a thematic workshop in conversation with Jones. These included “Writing to Mend,” facilitated by Jazz Hudson, “Cultivating Your Writing Community,” facilitated by Tiffany Banks, “Stepping into Power,” facilitated by Maud Alcorn, and “Creating Your Lane,” facilitated by Taylor Crumpton . Additionally, students from Bret Harte Middle School facilitated a workshop on “Telling Your Story”. 

“In this past year of Raise Your Voice, I have seen the illumination stories from Black women, working class, queer folks, immigrants, folks with varying ability, students, parents, activists, mental health professionals, and cis men as allies. This project would continue to push conversations around connection, expression, and speaking truth to power.”Alexandria Jones

Amber McCrary

Indigenous Zine Workshops

Amber McCrary collaborated with multiple organizations and individuals to host zinemaking workshops focused on Indigenous issues ranging from identity in the Bay Area, wellness, toxic masculinity, feminism, and missing and murdered women. In Oakland, workshops were hosted with the American Indian Child Resource Center, Sierra Edd, a PhD candidate in the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley and Chantel Jung of the zine collective Indigenous Honeys. Jung, Edd and McCrary created an online space for Indigenous people throughout the United States to tell their stories and create a collaborative zine. Along with the multiple zine projects these workshops inspired, McCrary created vlogs reflecting on each collaboration, and the unique role zinemaking can play for urban Indigenous people to tell their stories and access shared online and in person spaces. 

Click image to link to Amber McCrary's zine: 

2020-2021:

Alissa Weber 

Alissa Weber is developing a project engaging LGBTQ elders through the medium of narrative and storytelling. This project seeks to create greater visibility for a diversity of queer experience, and to connect youth and elders through conversation. 

Fatima Seck

Fatima Seck is one of two Glass Cube Fellows engaging with the Mills College Art Museum collections in 2020-21. In a series of public posts, Seck will write about California landscape art in photograph and film with a focus on feminist geographies.

Chantal Tom

Chantal Tom is one of two Glass Cube Fellows engaging with the Mills College Art Museum collections in 2020-21. In a series of public posts and a digital zine, Tom will write about the overlapping forces of capitalism, gentrification, and climate change and the impact of these things on California artists and writers.