My name is Shana Turner and Community Solstice is where my work as a writer, grassroots literary instructor, & organizational facilitator come together.
Born on the summer solstice, I am a working-class, queer femme of Irish and Jewish descent from Boston who lives in New Orleans. I bring two decades of experience with justice organizing, infrastructure development, participatory planning, creative writing projects, and collective learning through a popular education praxis.
Through my work, I seek to treat wounds as sites for transformation, to complicate the false binary between victim and offender in intra-community conflict, assess equity and disparities of power within groups, interrogate the construction and perpetuation of whiteness, and engage rituals of ceremony in the ordinary movements of everyday life.
Front porches, racial tensions, stretch marks, kitchen tables, coming of age, queerness, lives interrupted by violence, natural human magic and intricacies of working-class culture are threads in my writing. I am currently working to complete my first novel, Claiming Caleb.
Contact: info@communitysolstice.com