Presenters

• Francisca Coronado

  Francisca Porchas Coronado is a Mexican immigrant, Chicana, Latinx, feminist, and anti-racist organizer with over 17 years of experience in social justice movements. Francisca has worked on issues of civil rights, environmental and climate justice, criminalization, and immigration at the intersection of race and class at a local and national level. As former Organizing Director of Puente Human Rights Movement in Phoenix she has been one of the leading voices against deportations of migrants in the country. In 2017, Francisca was the recipient of the Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship that led her to create the Latinx Therapist Action Network. She is the co-founder and lead trainer of Resilient Strategies, a healing justice project transforming the impact of systems on our bodies, our behaviors, and the organizations we build as a critical part of the process to liberation. Currently she produces and hosts Mijente’s La Cura Podcast on decolonizing our health and reclaiming our healing. She has been initiated into the ancient, indigenous Yoruba tradition of IFA for over a decade and is currently a priestess in training.

• Kai Cheng Thom

  ​​Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and community healer in Toronto. She is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir Metonymy Press), the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2018), and the children’s picture book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li. Her latest book is the essay collection I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes at the End of the World (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2020). Kai Cheng won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers in 2017.

• Adaku Utah

  Hailing from Nigeria, Adaku is a healer, liberation educator and organizer, and performance ritual artist committed to healing and liberation within oppressed communities. For over ten years, her work has centered in movements for radical social change, with a focus on gender, sexuality, race, youth and healing justice. She is the founder and director of Harriet’s Apothecary, a healing village led by Black Cis Women, Queer and Trans folks committed to living out Harriet Tubman’s legacy of liberation in our tissues and our lineage. She is also the founder of BeatBox Botanicals, a local sliding-scale, love-centered, and community-inspired, plant medicine and healing practice. Adaku has taught, organized, created sacred healing spaces and performed both nationally and internationally as a Social Change Initiatives coordinator, rape crisis counselor, youth organizer, intuitive healer, gender-based violence advocate, dancer, liberation trainer, sex education teacher, herbalist, sexual violence organizing educator, and board member for several organizations including Yale University, Chicago Foundation for Women, The Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Black Lives Matter, Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER), Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Museum, Sadie Nash Leadership Project and more. Her greatest desire is to embody the sacredness and wholeness of love and support herself, humanity and our larger ecosystem in garnering and using our tools of love, healing and liberation to fashion just and sustainable realities.