Join Francesca Barjon, Jade Bryan, Jaysen Henderson-Greenbey, Anesu Nyatanga, Junauda Petrus, & Hari Ziyad to talk about Radical Black Love

Radical Black love has developed a Black political movement focused on mutual care. Radical Black love requires that we are concerned for and responsible to one another. In an anti-Black world such as this, to choose to love and support Black people is a highly rebellious and potentially dangerous act. In this panel, activists and authors will explore what Radical Black love means to them and how it sparks imaginations of a free world for us all.

Radical Black Love is the fourth in a series of five virtual events* presented by Reclaim Pride Coalition and the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division in the weeks leading up to the Queer Liberation March, on Sunday, June 27th, 2021.

FREE event!

You can livestream this event on the Bureau’s or Reclaim Pride Coalition’s Facebook pages or YouTube channels. You’ve got options! Registration is not required in order to join the event. Click on any of the links below to join us tonight, Friday, May 21, 2021, at 6 PM EDT:

Reclaim Pride Coalition’s FB page: https://www.facebook.com/queermarch/posts/3105235273042357

The Bureau’s FB page: https://www.facebook.com/BGSQD/posts/3956243421137943

The Bureau’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QluJxMrES04

RPC’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2PNybs0Vpg

In conjunction with these events, the Bureau’s online store now features a section devoted to titles recommended by Reclaim Pride Coalition members–click here to view recommended books on radical Black love.

Panelists’ biographies:

Francesca R. Barjon (she/her) is a Haitian-American community organizer and screenwriter based in NY. Francesca’s writing and perspective is informed by her experience as a Black bisexual woman organizing the Queer Liberation March in NYC. She focuses on bridging cultural gaps and facilitating difficult conversations while empowering Black people, LGBTQIATS+ people, disabled people and other marginalized groups. She lives by the tenet “none are free, until all are free” and strives to practice radical empathy in building relationships and community. Lastly, as a healthcare consultant, Francesca has considered how social determinants of health impact the LGBTQIATS+ community and make members vulnerable to various physical and mental health issues.

Jade Bryan (she/her) graduated with a BFA degree in film production from one of the world’s top film schools at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Jade founded DeafVision Filmworks, Inc. and Jade Films and Entertainment, LLC, and has produced and directed such award-winning documentaries as “Listen to the Hands of Our People”, ”On and Off Stage: The Bruce Hlibok Stories”, “9/11 Fear in Silence: The Forgotten Underdogs” and “Reaching Zenith: A Black Deaf Filmmaker’s Journey.”

Jade completed her first feature, “If Your Could Hear My Own Tune”, which toured the festival circuit from 2010-2012. She worked tirelessly on the film for nine (9) years, which she produced in 2001. Jade in talks about producing it into a musical play (staged reading) this summer/fall of 2018. The new title is “Feel My Song.”

“The Shattered Mind” is her most recent feature film she completed in 2014 and toured 47 film festivals around the globe. “The Shattered Mind” won 17 awards; included Best Sound, Audience Award, Special Jury Prize, Best Exhibition Film and Best Narrative Feature and Short.

One of Jade’s projects, “The Two Essences”, a comedy sitcom pilot, will be her first television series. She is also pitching another pilot, “The Innocent Project,” about deaf females hero complex. And she is also working on a documentary, “Black and Deaf in America”, about various issues regarding deaf (African-Americans) who were impacted by police brutality, racism, black erasure and oppression in the educational system.

Jade believes in promoting inclusion, awareness, and positive representation of Deaf Talent of Color in television and film. She created the #DeafTalent® Movement on social media in 2012.

Jaysen Henderson-Greenbey (they/them) is a NYU Gallatin alum and former leader of NYU’s Queer Union, a position they held for three years. Their undergraduate concentration, “Storytelling from the Margins: Black Women’s Narratives,” explored themes of blackness, queerness, and marginality in literature, film, and music. Jaysen is a writer whose work explores the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender.

Anesu Nyatanga (he/him) studied Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University’s college of arts and science, and he believes in using an intersectional framework to support marginalized individuals in a variety of capacities. He worked with the New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Operations and Civic Engagement Commission. Here he coordinated interpretation services for limited-English proficient voters during NYC elections. While at NYU, he served as the Vice-Chair for the Student Senators Council and as a Senator-at-Large for Black and Trans students. He was the inaugural Gender & Sexuality Chair of the Governance Council for Marginalized and Minority Students, which serves to unify and provide a channel of access to institutional bodies between all student organizations and committees in the Global Network. Additionally, he was one of the thought leaders for Shades, a student group for LGBTQ people of color. On his days off, Anesu loves to weight lift, go to the movies, and argue about pop culture icons with his friends.

Junauda Petrus-Nasah (she/her) is a writer, a soul sweetener, runaway witch, and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born and working on unceded Dakota land in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award. And she really, really loves to eat and write about delicious food. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, a Black, experimental healing art collective. She is currently working on her second novel Black Circus, set in the 90s about a young, Black woman studying circus with a mysterious elder former circus performer.

Hari Ziyad (they/them) is a screenwriter, the editor-in-chief of RaceBaitr, and the bestselling author of Black Boy Out of Time (2021). They are a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow, and their writing has been featured in Vanity Fair, Gawker, Out, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Ebony, Mic, Slate and Salon among other publications.

*Watch recordings of the previous three RPC/Bureau panels on the Bureau’s YouTube channel (click on links to view):

No Place to Call Home: Queer and Trans Houselessness, 2021, took place on April 15, 2021.

Generations of Queer Activism took place on April 27, 2021.

We Keep Us Safe: Prison Abolition and Transformative Justice took place on May 7, 2021.