Press Press is excited to launch their forthcoming anthology Commune Diverge Shift Connect: Press Press’s Organizational Handbook co-published by Institute for Expanded Research in Fall 2023. As part of this release that is just ahead of the collective’s 10 year anniversary in 2024, they will be in conversation for Vox Populi’s Teaching at the End of Times at The Head and The Hand bookstore. At the event, collective members Vale Cabezas, Kimi Hanauer, Lo, and Bilphena Decontee Yahwon will reflect on their collaborative relationship, methodologies and practices. Attendees will also be invited to sit in conversation with another on kindred themes and asked to sit with the following: What are the conditions necessary for cultivating and sustaining ethical and compassionate frameworks for being with and cooperating with others in the world?

Co-hosted by Ulises

Panel Discussion 6:30-7:30PM

About the Facilitators:

Kimi Hanauer is an artist, media-based organizer, and facilitator based on Tongva-Gabrielino Land (Los Angeles). Kimi founded Press Press in 2014 while working as an educator with Baltimore City Community College Refugee Youth Project. In their practice, Kimi co-develops pragmatic-poetic initiatives that aim to build collective autonomy and decentralize institutional resources. Currently, Kimi is stewarding a slow process of emergence for the Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry. Kimi is a queer diasporan of Sephardic-Ashkenazi descent; born in Tel-Aviv with historic roots in Jerusalem; Germany; Spain; among other lands.

Bilphena Decontee Yahwon is a Baltimore-based cultural organizer, interdisciplinary artist, and transformative justice practitioner, born in Suakoko, Bong County, Liberia. Her work is concerned with the uses of individual and collective memory: how we inherit it, how we preserve it and how we pass it down. Yahwon is the steward of The Womanist Reader, a free online library, a collective member of interdisciplinary publishing initiative Press Press, and a founding member of New Generation Scholars Intergenerational Institute (NGSII), an African centered global education platform.

Vale Cabezas (b. 1994 Rancagua, Chile) is a maker currently living on the unceded land of the Piscataway, Conoy, and Susquehannock peoples (Baltimore, Maryland). With a background in textile design, printmaking, and sculpting, their practice is characterized by a commitment to collaboration and community building. Vale has been a core Press Press member since 2015.

Lo is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Seoul, South Korea who calls Baltimore home. They joined Press Press through a creative writing workshop at Refugee Youth Project in 2016 and became a community-taught book-maker. They are a jewelry designer and a metalsmith in training with a background in sculpture.

More about Press Press here.