Chicago writer Kemi Alabi, Northwestern’s current Feminist in Residence, is bringing their passion for Black reproductive justice work to Evanston.
In 2020, NU’s Women’s Center introduced the Feminist in Residence Program, which accepts applications from community-based artists and activists. If selected, the artist enters an academic-year-long fellowship that provides them additional resources to further their feminist work while engaging the Northwestern community.
Alabi’s debut book, “Against Heaven,” was selected as the winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award, among other honors. During this fellowship with the University, they are documenting and exploring the stories of Black queer and trans people with uterine fibroids, which is a typically non-cancerous tumor that grows in and on the uterus. Alabi was personally impacted by uterine fibroids.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: What drew you to the Feminist in Residence position here?
Alabi: It’s something that I heard about from my community, and it’s a great opportunity for artists who are community-minded and grounded in feminism — Black feminism — to be able to have support in developing a project. I’ve worked for over a decade in the reproductive justice movement, and I have a project that concerns fibroids and Black queer and trans people. It felt like it might be a good space and time to incubate some of those ideas with the Women’s Center at Northwestern.
The Daily: What does your role entail and what will your project look like?
Alabi: What’s really beautiful about the fellowship is that the Women’s Center grants artists a lot of autonomy to be able to create. My project is a writing project. Right now, I’m interviewing Black queer and trans people who have had uterine fibroids. Black people with uteruses are more impacted by fibroids and have more severe cases, and there’s no official medical reason why. This project is a poetic theory about the overdevelopment of fibroids and an opportunity to have queer and trans voices in the mix.
The event will be available to the Northwestern community and the greater Chicago community at the end of Spring Quarter, where I’ll be able to share a bit of what I’ve done. The event will be a combination of written work people can engage in, some audio that will be playing throughout the space, and then some participatory activities for the people who come through.
The Daily: What inspires your work as a writer?
Alabi: There’s something about the power of language and story and the sonic elements of poetry that can really move people and transform entire communities. I’m motivated by those lineages of Black feminist writers who have used the power of word to open new doors and radicalize, as I have been radicalized by them. I’m inspired by the Black feminist writing traditions that have changed my life and continue to change the world.
Email: [email protected]
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— Q&A: Feminist in Residence Kyrin Hobson shares the inspiration behind her artwork
