Loving Corrections: adrienne maree brown in conversation with Mary Hooks and Charlene Carruthers

n celebration of Charis' 50th birthday year, we proudly welcome adrienne maree brown in conversation with Mary Hooks and Charlene Carruthers to The Friends School of Atlanta for a discussion of Loving Corrections. New York Times-bestselling author adrienne maree brown knows we need each other more than ever, and offers "loving corrections" a roadmap towards collective power, righting wrongs, and true belonging.

This selection of prescient, compassionate essays explores patterns we engage in that are rooted in limited thinking. Through a lens of "loving correction" rather than mere critique, author adrienne maree brown helps us reimagine how to hold ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities accountable by setting clear boundaries, engaging in reflection, and nurturing honest relationships.

Loving Corrections is divided into two sections, with the first portion featuring new essays including "A Word for White People" and "Relinquishing the Patriarchy" and writing on topics like moving from fragility to fortitude, disability, and navigating critique within activist communities. The second section expands and updates pieces from brown's popular monthly column "Murmurations" in YES Magazine that explore accountability--within oneself and community--with depth, inventiveness, and empathy.

Along with allowing us more authentic access to ourselves and to each other, the "corrections" in the book's title are intended to explore and break identity-based patterns including white supremacy, fragility, patriarchy, and ableism. brown also offers practical guidance on how to apologize and be accountable from our nuanced positions of power, history, and resources.

Building on her previous work, which is grounded in the lineage of Octavia Butler, brown reminds us how much we need each other: "It is only through relationship that we learn how to be, understand our impact on others and explore small shifts that may yield remarkable collective change."

Charis Books and More turns 50 this year with celebrations from November 2nd-9th. Our theme, "Take Root Among the Stars," is a Parable of the Sower inspired invocation of the last 50 years of Charis history and dreams of the feminist future.

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her collaborations and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.

Mary Hooks is a 42yr old Black, lesbian, feminist, abolitionist, pan-Africanist mother and wife. She is a member of Southerners On New Ground and part of the leadership of the Movement 4 Black Lives. Her people are migrants of the Great Migration, factory workers, church folks, Black women, hustlers and addicts, dykes, studs, femmes, queens, and all people fighting for the liberation of oppressed people. Hooks has been at the forefront of fights to abolish money bail, defund police, re-imagine public safety, and develop new organizers.

Charlene A. Carruthers (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer, and Black Studies PhD Candidate at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her work interrogates historical conjunctures of Black freedom-making post-emancipation and decolonial revolution, Black governance, Black/Native/Indigenous relationalities, and Black feminist abolitionist geographies. Her work spans more than 20 years of community organizing across racial, gender, and economic justice movements. She served as the founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), and is author of the bestselling book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.

The Friends School of Atlanta's mission is to provide challenging academics in a diverse environment, drawing on the values, of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and stewardship to empower our students to go out into the world with conscience, conviction and compassion.