This event takes place on crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. Register here.
Charis Presents Writers on Abortion Now!
The panel features Hannah Matthews (moderator), Alana Edmondson (contributor to Shout Your Abortion), Natalie Lim (contributor to Sex & The Single Woman), and Nicole Walker (contributor to Choice Words).
Following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe V. Wade, leaving it to states to decide whether people have access to Reproductive Health Care, we invite the community to join us in a discussion on Abortion Access. Shout Your Abortion is a collection of photos, essays, and creative work inspired by the movement of the same name, a template for building new communities of healing, and a call to action. A feminist anthology inspired by legendary Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, featuring twenty-four new essays on the triumphs and heartbreaks of modern singlehood. Choice Words collects essential voices that renew our courage in the struggle to defend reproductive rights.
This event is co-sponsored by Access Reproductive Care-Southeast. ARC-Southeast is a reproductive justice organization based in Atlanta, Georgia that funds abortion and builds power in the region. We provide funding and logistical support to ensure Southerners receive safe and compassionate reproductive care including abortion services. Through education and leadership development, we build power in communities of color to abolish stigma and restore dignity and justice. Since 2016, ARC-Southeast has completed nearly 26,000 intakes for Southerners living in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR:
Hannah Matthews is an abortion care worker and author. Her writing has been published in ELLE, Esquire, Teen Vogue, McSweeney's, Catapult, BUST, and other outlets. Her book about community abortion care, YOU OR SOMEONE YOU LOVE, is forthcoming from Atria Books in 2023, and her free newsletter of abortion love letters, Bringing Down the Flowers, is published regularly on Substack. More information can be found on her website.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Alana Edmondson is a Ph.D. student in English at Yale University and a long-time advocate for the right to an abortion. Alana has worked with Planned Parenthood and NARAL and has interviewed about abortion with New York Times, CNN, and VICE among others. Alana primarily works with Shout Your Abortion and contributed one of the many abortion stories in Shout Your Abortion (2018). She has had two abortions that she is very grateful for.
Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer from Las Vegas, Nevada, and Hialeah, Florida. She is a first-generation college graduate of Northwestern University and a graduate of the MFA program in creative nonfiction writing at the University of Arizona. Her essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Longreads, Guernica, Catapult, Brevity, The Offing, Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from PEN America Emerging Voices, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the VONA/Voices Workshop, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and a residency from Hedgebrook. Natalie is currently working on a memoir in essays. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @natalielima09.
Nicole Walker is the author of eight books, most recently Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021) Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. (2019) She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a noted author in Best American Essays. Her work has been most recently published in the New York Times, Longreads, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review, among other places. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, and serves as the Crux Series Editor for the University of Georgia Press.
This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage
Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.
By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to info@chariscircle.org immediately.
Following the U.S. Congress's attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion became a viral conduit for abortion storytelling, receiving extensive media coverage and positioning real human experiences at the center of America’s abortion debate for the first time.
One of Bustle's Best Books of May
With reproductive freedom under unprecedented attack, Choice Words, edited by poet Annie Finch, takes back the cultural conversation on abortion.
2022 New Mexico- Arizona Book Award Finalist
" Walker] produces observations as beautifully written as they are thoughtful...An effective illumination of the profound difference between right thought and right action.'"
--KIRKUS REVIEWS
In Sustainability: A Love Story, Nicole Walker questions what it means to live sustainably while still being able to have Internet and eat bacon. After all, who wants to listen to a short, blond woman who is mostly a hypocrite anyway—who eats cows, drives a gasoline-powered car, who owns no solar panels—tsk-tsking them?