Contact Us
Mills Performing Arts
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94613
P: 510.430.2191
E: millsperformingarts@northeastern.edu
Community Collaborators
The East Bay, Mills’ home, has long been the birthplace of crucial performance poetry collectives and publishing efforts, especially those aligned with racial and gender justice. Continuing the Mills tradition of experimentation in graduate and undergraduate education, We Are the Voices supports the development of innovative, even risky, ways of presenting poetry and scholarship in nonacademic settings. With the support and guidance of faculty advisor Stephanie Young, students design and implement public projects that explore the transformative power of literature in East Bay communities and beyond.
2021-2022 Collaborators
Tiffany Cruz
Maidens in the Moorlands: Black Women in 19th-Century British Literature
Tiffany Cruz presented her letterpress illuminated book project on April 22nd in the Heller Room at the Mills College library. She compared two 19th-century British novels whose protagonists are Black Women: the 1808 epistolary novel of manners, The Woman of Colour (Anonymous) and the 1897 fin-de-siecle Gothic sensation The Blood of the Vampire (Florence Marryat). In the illuminated book,Tiffany put these texts in conversation with reproduced images of European artworks that centered upper class Black women; these juxtapositions showcase how raced and gendered Eurocentric conceptions of selfhood limited both lived and literary arcs for the Black woman, regardless of her financial status. The project demonstrates the impossibility of even a fictional happy ending for the Black woman in a country whose empire was based on racial capital. In her lecture, she shared the inspiration behind her project, explained the aesthetic and material choices she made in creating the physical book, and presented and analyzed examples from the book itself. Tiffany’s lecture was followed by a Q&A with input from the in-person and live stream audience.

Caroline Gasparini
Caroline is developing a project that brings together LGBTQ+ poets, writers, and activists impacted by the criminal justice system in conversation around how mass incarceration affects the LGBTQ+ community. The goal is to produce an original journal of work that imagines a radically just future beyond the confines presented by mass incarceration and systemic inequities. The project seeks to catalyze discussion around mass incarceration, LGBTQ+ rights, and the transformative social change that occurs when centering the voices and stories of those most impacted by the issues at hand.

Zehra Shah
Decentering the Archive: Migration of Memory, Tradition & Identity
Zehra Jabeen Shah curated a 3-day exhibit, Decentering the Archive: Migration of Memory, Tradition & Identity. The project was decolonial in nature. It aimed to challenge and expand the notion of what it means to be an ‘archive.’ It also questioned the politics of archival materials within modern working museums. Working with 5 different artists, the exhibit explored how archives journey from one space to another, encompassing a whole life of their own. They are not merely passive objects neatly placed behind decorated cabinets, but ones that grant life to legends, traditions, and bodies containing their own pasts and emotional history. The artists she worked with were Andrea Guskin, Tianzong Jiang, Ava Koohbor, Jesse Dutton-Kenny and Alice Lincoln-Kook.

Tovah Strong
Perforations Journal
Tovah curated Perforations Journal, a digital multimedia project that attempts to examine and peel open abstractions of borders–particularly the U.S.-Mexico border–and what lies beneath by bringing visual poems, art, and maps into proximity. The journal presents original poems by four contemporary writers, reprinted artworks, and one of many historical threads of maps that depict North America with and without borders–from the 19th century to the present. Perforations exists as a small opening into a large and complex conversation that she hopes will encourage readers to expand their curiosity beyond the works that the journal is honored to hold.

Past Community Collaborators
2019-2020:
Mia Boykin and Marissa Houston
Coming of Age in East Oakland
Mia Boykin and Marissa Houston’s project engages a group of middle school students at Bret Harte Middle School in the Dimond district of East Oakland, introducing them to a diverse body of texts geared towards youth. With its potential to construct positive identity formation and a sense of community, young adult literature is a crucial space for students to bear witness and give voice to diverse histories and stories. This is especially true for middle school students in Oakland, an epicenter of national conversations around gentrification, the housing crisis, gun violence, education reform, and criminal justice reform. Students at Bret Harte read and watched texts such as Into the Spiderverse and ultimately created their own coming of age narrative about life in Oakland. Students also facilitated a workshop on the Mills campus through the Mills Oakland Writers Workshop.
Alexandria Jones
Mills Oakland Writers Worshop: Raise Your Voice
Alexandria Jones curated a series of free community workshops on campus, facilitated by four Oakland writers. These workshops continued the tradition of on campus workshops organized by Clare Lilliston in 2018-19, while reflecting Jones’s unique approach. In person and virtually, each workshop had an average 15 and 20 participants. Each writer (or pair of writers) created a thematic workshop in conversation with Jones. These included “Writing to Mend,” facilitated by Jazz Hudson, “Cultivating Your Writing Community,” facilitated by Tiffany Banks, “Stepping into Power,” facilitated by Maud Alcorn, and “Creating Your Lane,” facilitated by Taylor Crumpton . Additionally, students from Bret Harte Middle School facilitated a workshop on “Telling Your Story”.

“In this past year of Raise Your Voice, I have seen the illumination stories from Black women, working class, queer folks, immigrants, folks with varying ability, students, parents, activists, mental health professionals, and cis men as allies. This project would continue to push conversations around connection, expression, and speaking truth to power.”Alexandria Jones
Amber McCrary
Indigenous Zine Workshops
Amber McCrary collaborated with multiple organizations and individuals to host zinemaking workshops focused on Indigenous issues ranging from identity in the Bay Area, wellness, toxic masculinity, feminism, and missing and murdered women. In Oakland, workshops were hosted with the American Indian Child Resource Center, Sierra Edd, a PhD candidate in the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley and Chantel Jung of the zine collective Indigenous Honeys. Jung, Edd and McCrary created an online space for Indigenous people throughout the United States to tell their stories and create a collaborative zine. Along with the multiple zine projects these workshops inspired, McCrary created vlogs reflecting on each collaboration, and the unique role zinemaking can play for urban Indigenous people to tell their stories and access shared online and in person spaces.

2020-2021:
Alissa Weber
Alissa Weber is developing a project engaging LGBTQ elders through the medium of narrative and storytelling. This project seeks to create greater visibility for a diversity of queer experience, and to connect youth and elders through conversation.
Fatima Seck
Fatima Seck is one of two Glass Cube Fellows engaging with the Mills College Art Museum collections in 2020-21. In a series of public posts, Seck will write about California landscape art in photograph and film with a focus on feminist geographies.
Chantal Tom
Chantal Tom is one of two Glass Cube Fellows engaging with the Mills College Art Museum collections in 2020-21. In a series of public posts and a digital zine, Tom will write about the overlapping forces of capitalism, gentrification, and climate change and the impact of these things on California artists and writers.