Fire Dreams

Women With A Vision (WWAV) is a Black feminist collective based in New Orleans that has spent 35 years working for the liberation of its communities. Its work covers reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice and sex workers' rights. In 2012, soon after one of its biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed the group's headquarters.

Fire Dreams is a collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who together present a social movement ethnography of the organization's rebirth after the arson. The book places WWAV in the geography of the South and in the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers. It draws together stories of the founders' pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing against criminalization after Hurricane Katrina, along with their connections to liberation movements around the world.

Throughout, McTighe and WWAV reject the logics of racial capitalism and share the organization's own knowledge about building new worlds, as well as the methods it uses to live out Black feminist futures in the present. The book is meant as a toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars and anyone who dreams of making the world otherwise. It is published by Duke University Press.