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Afrofuturist, Abolitionist Visions
Welcome to Dream, Create, Liberate: A Future Without Family Policing, the inaugural creative publication brought to you by the upEND Movement. As we embark on this journey of imagination and liberation, we invited artists to join us in envisioning a world free from family policing.
Through Afrofuturist-inspired visual art, poetry, and short works of fiction, we seek to weave together a tapestry of visions that transcend the limitations of our present reality. By tapping into the boundless creativity of artists, we hope to spark dialogue, inspire action, and pave the way for transformative change.
So let us dream boldly and create fearlessly. Together, we can build a future where every family is free to flourish, unburdened by the specter of family policing.
Meet the Judges
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
Poetry Judge
Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton is an internationally-known writer, director, performer, critic, and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Houston, TX. She is author of the Newsworthy (Bloomsday Literary, 2019), its German counterpart Berichtenswert (Elif Verlag, 2021), and the recently released memoir Black Chameleon (Henry Holt & Co, 2023).
Josie Pickens
Short Fiction Judge
upEND’s program director Josie Pickens is a Houston, TX-based organizer, educator, journalist, and culturalist whose writings and public conversations focus on race, gender, and sexuality. She has more than twenty years of community organizing experience where her focus has been prison-industrial-complex abolition, family policing system abolition, and building mutual aid networks.
Adam Pendleton
Visual Art Judge
Adam Pendleton is based in Brooklyn, New York. Pendleton’s work is a reflection of how we increasingly move through and experience the world on a sensorial level. His work poses questions about the legacy of modernism in the present day, reactivating ideas from historic avant-gardes across mediums and moments in time.
Poetry
Selected by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
Ryan Jafar Artes
Grand Prize Winner
Creating Nostalgia for a Life I Never Lived
I Place Us Together at the End of a Sentence That Might Never Be
(Parent) Thesis
Jolie Venettine Brownell Virgile
Prize Winner
My name is Devonte Hart
Dear mother.
Stay there.
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion
Prize Winner
Spell for Trans Liberation
On the Day the Last Prison Closed (I)
On the Day the Last Prison Closed (II)
The Great March Home (I)
The Great March Home (II)
Short Fiction
Selected by Josie Pickens
Jessyka Linton
Grand Prize Winner
Homeland
Jacqueline Peoples
Prize Winner
Baby Che’
Amaka Okoro
Prize Winner
Isla’s Law
Visual Art
Selected by Adam Pendleton
Moses Ojo
Grand Prize Winner
Life’s Odyssey
Chavonté Wright
Prize Winner
Minor Revolutions
Nadeem Justice
Prize Winner
Heavenly Disillusionment
Acknowledgments
We are thankful for everyone who submitted to our first creative publication! This was a leap of faith and so many excellent artists answered the call. Thank you to our judges, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Josie Pickens, and Adam Pendleton for your expertise in selecting our prize-winning submissions.
We also thank Montrose Grace Place and artist Tay Butler for helping upEND host a free collage workshop locally in Houston. We are inspired by the young people who opened their space to us to imagine together.
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