Fridays at Newcomb: Women With A Vision’s Fire Dreams: A Conversation about Black Feminist Liberation in the South
Deon Haywood is an activist, human rights advocate, mother and grandmother, and community
leader from New Orleans. For more than 30 years, she has advocated for the rights of Black
women and girls, poor and working class folks, sex workers, substance users, and LGBTQ+
communities in the Deep South.
Following Hurricane Katrina, Haywood was named executive director of Women With A Vision
(WWAV), the groundbreaking HIV/AIDS prevention organization that pioneered harm reduction
in the Deep South. Under Deon’s leadership, WWAV’s work blossomed, connecting HIV/AIDS
prevention and education to reproductive justice, youth advocacy, harm reduction, and more. In
2012, WWAV helped organize sex workers to stand up for their rights and defeat Louisiana’s
archaic “Crimes Against Nature by Solicitation'' statute that victimized poor, Black women and
LGBTQ+ individuals by placing them on the sex offender registry. This defeat was a milestone
victory for constitutional rights in Louisiana as those affected were removed from the sex
offender registry in 2013 and were able to begin rebuilding their lives.
Through her relentless advocacy, Haywood has grown WWAV into a leading voice fighting the
criminalization of Black women and girls and advancing community-led policy solutions on
international and national stages and at home in Louisiana. She has been honored for her work
at by the Center for Constitutional Rights, SisterSong, Ms. Foundation, National Organization of
Women (NOW), ACLU Louisiana, the Human Rights Campaign, the Red Door Foundation,
Philadelphia FIGHT, Planned Parenthood, Forum for Equality, BET.com, Frontline Defenders
Dublin Platform, and more. In 2018, she was appointed to the New Orleans Human Relations
Commission to advance the body’s work on Human Rights and Equity. Essence Magazine
named her Hometown Hero and profiled her as a part of its special “Love Letter to New Orleans”
issue.
“Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South,” the story of how Women With A
Vision organizes for the liberation of its communities, was published in Spring of 2024.
Deon lives in New Orleans with her wife Shaquita and their three dogs SoG, Beau,and
LavenderG. She loves reading, spending time with her family, and investing in the next
generation of radical Black women.
Laura McTighe is an abolitionist, ethnographer, organizer, and mama, who has dedicated her life to weaving liberatory futures and building the connections that make them possible. She has been a part of the US and global movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons for more than twenty-five years, co-founding multiple projects, including TEACH Outside, Prison Health News, Project UNSHACKLE, and the Tallahassee Bail Fund. Now a leading scholar activist in the fields of religion, abolition, and mutual aid, McTighe is an associate professor of religion at Florida State University and the co-founder of Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans. Her research, teaching, and service all center collaborative knowledge production as both theory and method for analyzing the violences of gendered racial capitalism in our everyday lives, and for dreaming beyond what is to build together the world that must be.
McTighe is the author with the Women With A Vision (WWAV) collective of Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South, published by Duke University Press in 2024. Her other writings, all deeply collaborative, have appeared in numerous academic venues, including Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal for the Anthropology of North America, Radical History Review, and Southern Cultures, as well as public-facing outlets like Truthout and The Revealer.
Currently, she also serves as Principal Investigator on two major public humanities and social science research projects funded through generous grants from the Henry Luce Foundation: “Creating the World Anew: Religion, Economy, and Mutual Aid,” which she co-leads with Elayne Oliphant and Daniel Vaca, and “The Callie House Project: Religion and Public Health in the Black Experience in the American South,” which she co-organizes with WWAV’s Deon Haywood. Both of these projects align closely with her next book project, Abolition is Sacred Work
McTighe is presently living in Baltimore, where she was born and raised. She is a builder of altars and worker of clay, both practices passed down through her maternal lineages.
