I am an egungun (ancestral) priest in the Yoruba Orisa tradition, Black Studies practitioner, Reiki Master, healer, poet, writer, teacher, and birth doula.

Through literature, creative writing, and collaborative community projects, I explore how unresolved ancestral emotions related to the Middle Passage manifest in the lives of descendants and ways in which these emotions and the subsequent woundings can be healed. I am committed to helping communities heal from a range of traumas. This often takes the form of collaborative projects that combine history, narrative, creative arts, and rituals grounded in a community's "knowing". It also means making my own process and experiences available to my communities, especially when it is possible to demonstrate what I do as sites for dynamic praxis. To accomplish this, I continue to create. I am the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Wishful Thinking and Still Breathing. My poems have been anthologized in Gathering Ground, Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century, Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places, I Feel A Little Jumpy Around You, and Catch the Fire, Jane’s Stories, Lorraine and James, and rhino. Excerpts of my memory work, The Ariran’s Last Life, have been performed at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, and published in Best African American Fiction 2010, The Kenyon Review, Warpland, Margin Magazine, and Let Spirit Speak! (SUNY Press). Excerpts from my memoir, Arroyo, which details my leg of the Middle Passage Voyage with Captain Bill Pinkney, have been published in nocturnes. Recent interviews about that trip can be found on Bloomington Public Radio (WFHB). Sankofa in Action, my community healing process, has been published in Black Diaspora Review (Indiana University, Spring 2011), a special issue I was invited to co-edit with Professor Valerie Grim. I am also co-editor of a chapbook of narratives by immigrant women published by Jane’s Stories Press (with Shobha Sharma, 2012) and Jane’s Stories III: Women Writing Across Boundaries (with Glenda Bailey-Mershon, 2006). I am a Cave Canem Fellow, and have received other writing fellowships from Norcroft, Sacatar (Brasil), and Ragdale foundations. Finally, I served as poet and ritualist-in-residence for the UNESCO-Transatlantic Slave Trade Route-USA Project for 7 years, and am the creator of The Arroyo Healing Network.

Maria Eliza Hamilton Bispo de Jesus Abegunde (Abegunde)  

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I am a practitioner of many things: Black Studies, poetry, writing, community healing. To practice means to actively and continuously engage with strategies and tools to attain mastery of a process, skill, craft, or discipline. Practice teaches me about the ever-changing intersections where history and memory, trauma and healing, the past and present meet by listening to the stories members of my various communities in the United States and Brazil share with me. And through my own writing and artistic collaborations. The outcome: we witness and testify to lived experiences often relegated to liminal spaces. But, it is more than that. Continuously asking these questions within specific historical timeframes helps us redefine how we and our ancestors make or made meaning of particular events and our responses to them. I hope that doing so helps us change the relationships we have not only with the past, but also with each other, the present, the future, and ourselves.