FIRE
DREAMS

Laura McTighe,
with Women With A Vision

FOREWORD BY DEON HAYWOOD

MAKING BLACK FEMINIST LIBERATION IN THE SOUTH

© Carla Jay Harris. Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers' rights.

In 2012, shortly after one of WWAV's biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed their headquarters.

Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth.

Rooting WWAV in the geography of the South and the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers…

McTighe and WWAV weave together stories from their founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—with other movements for liberation as accomplices.

PRAISE FOR FIRE DREAMS

“Providing an urgent and layered account of Black feminist abolitionist organizing, this book is a model of nuanced, accessible, and theoretically deft scholar-activist work. Laura McTighe and Women With A Vision demonstrate that Black feminism mobilized with persistence is a worldmaking politics and practice. Fire Dreams is a gorgeous work of care, radical planning, and theory that will inspire and enlighten readers.”

— Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

“When fighting the amassed forces of injustice, our oppressors must remember that fire burns and fire also replenishes. The inspiring story of Deon Haywood and Women With A Vision recounts how nothing can quench the determination of people demanding freedom, and nothing can quell the passion of those who have committed their lives to justice and human rights. This is essential reading for those of us learning to be fearless in the service of our people.”

— Loretta J. Ross, activist, author, and MacArthur fellow

"Fire Dreams is a groundbreaking book for many reasons […] It is a work of deep and rigorous scholarship, peer-reviewed and published by a prestigious academic press, that will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research. At the same time, and just as importantly, the book is written as a toolkit for activists and organizers working for justice, care, and freedom for their communities. It’s an extraordinary book — in no small part because it is also beautifully written."

— Kali Handelman, “The Fire to Create the World Anew,” The Revealer