We Are Meant to Rise:

The School of Liberal Arts and Cultures and Student Life held a virtual reading and panel discussion featuring editors and writers from the book We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. The event was free and open to the public.

When: April 14, 2022 from Noon to 1:30 p.m.

What: The virtual event highlighted the compelling work We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, a significant collection featuring Indigenous writers and writers of color who bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in the history of the United States. Essays and poems vividly reflect and comment on the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of passionate, worldwide demands for justice.

Moderator

The event will be moderated by editor David Mura and include readings and commentary from some of the contributors to the book.

David Mura, editor, is the author of a new book A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing. He is the author of two memoirs, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, which won the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and Where the Body Meets Memory.

Contributors

Pamela Fletcher Bush, contributor, is CEO and publisher of Arcata Press | Saint Paul Almanac and professor emerita of English (Saint Catherine University, St. Paul, Minnesota). She is a widely published writer in various genres and has won literary awards and fellowships for creative nonfiction, arts criticism and poetry. Fletcher Bush has lectured in Oxford, England; Accra, Ghana; Toronto, Canada and Mexico.

Shannon Gibney, contributor, is a writer, educator, activist and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), and Dream Country (Dutton, 2018) young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards in 2016 and 2019. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis College, where she teaches writing. She is a Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow. She is co-editor of What God Is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color (Minnesota, 2019), and her new novel, Botched, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir (Dutton, 2023).

Ricardo Levins Morales, contributor, is a Puerto Rican artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He uses his art as a form of political medicine to support individual and collective healing from the injuries and ongoing reality of oppression.

Melissa Olson, contributor, is an Indigenous person of mixed Anishinaabe and Euro-American heritage, a tribal citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. For several years, Melissa has worked as a writer and producer of Independent Public Media having served as the co-managing editor of the MinneCulture program at KFAI Fresh Air Radio. In the spring of 2022, Melissa will contribute to Minnesota Public Radio's North Star Journey project. Melissa lives in Minneapolis.

Diane Wilson, contributor, is an award-winning Dakota author of a recently published novel, The Seed Keeper; a memoir, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past; a non-fiction collection, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life; and a middle-grade biography Ella Cara Deloria: Dakota Language Protector. Her essays have been featured in many publications, including We Are Meant to Rise; Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations; and A Good Time for the Truth. She has received numerous grants, including a 2013 Bush Fellowship, and the 2018 AARP/Pollen 50 Over 50 Community Leadership award. Wilson is enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation.