The NC State Women’s Center and our campus partners invite you to join our Women’s Herstory Month celebration with keynote speaker Charlene Carruthers, author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. Carruthers will spend March 19, 2019 with the NC State community, engaging in a meet and greet, a workshop and keynote presentation in Talley Student Union.

Charlene Carruthers is a Black, queer feminist community organizer and writer with over fifteen years of experience in racial justice, feminist and youth leadership development movement work. A believer in telling more complete stories about the Black Radical Tradition, Carruthers provides critical analysis, political education and leadership development training for activists across the globe.

As the founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), Carruthers has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national, member-led organization of Black 18–35-year-olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people.

Her passion for developing young leaders to build capacity within marginalized communities has led her to work on immigrant rights, economic justice and civil rights campaigns nationwide. Her inspirations include a range of Black women, including her mother, Ella Baker, Cathy Cohen, Marsha P. Johnson and Barbara Ransby.

Carruthers’ visit is made possible by a host of NC State campus partners of the Women’s Center, including the Department of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Studies, the Women of Welch Living and Learning Village, the Black Male Initiative Living and Learning Village, the GLBT Center, Multicultural Student Affairs, the African American Cultural Center, and NCSU Libraries. Additionally, this visit was partially funded by an NC State Live Mini-Grant as a part of our Supporting Womxn in Action, Social Justice In Action Residency Program.

The keynote address will take place on March 19, 2019 at 7:00 p.m. in Piedmont-Mountains Ballroom, Talley Student Union. A book signing will take place immediately after.

• For more information and tickets, see the Women’s Center website.

About Womxn’s HERstory Month

During this year’s Womxn’s HERstory Month, the Women’s Center aims to provide strategies for unlearning and retelling. We invite our partners to join us as we honor the Combahee River Collective Statement, “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression” (1977). This commitment holds true for us as well as for other political activists and strategists. Therefore, we put forth this call to action: Our Voice, Our Bodies, Our Stories: Tools for Radical Transformation. Throughout the month, we will interrogate systems and ignite radical traditions in order to make space for critical discourse and the reclaiming of space. We expect programs to promote learning in the following ways:

• Unlearning: To unlearn harmful narratives that allow for acts of mental, emotional and physical violence against others.
• Decolonizing: To decolonize by calling attention to systems of oppression and injustice.
• Retelling: To retell stories, narratives and lived experiences by centering the power and agency of voice.

Join us. For more information, see the Women’s Center website.

Angela Gay is assistant director of the Women’s Center.