Free Black Dirt’s curatorial vision focused on multidimensional, engaged, and interactive writings within themes of Black joy, Afrofuturism, and transformation. The writers we selected are people who are saturated in whimsical imaginings and obsessed with revolutionary magic. They look at craft and artistic process as ritual and subject matter.

As writers and activists, we see the importance of Afrofuturism in social justice struggles, specifically (but not limited to) prison abolition and the policing of Blackness. As writers we are investigating themes of healing, queerness, wildness, and joy within Blackness, and how these become compasses when we are confronted with experiences of Black destruction and demise. What does a black liberation future look like? How can we imagine blackness flourishing through expression and celebration? Telling our stories, being in our bodies, looking to the stars—what are the bounds of our possibility?