Deirdre Cooper Owens is an associate professor of history at Queens College, CUNY in New York and an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer. She has won a number of prestigious honors, including the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Postdoctoral Fellowship and appointment as an American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology Fellow. Cooper Owens earned her PhD from UCLA, where she wrote an award-winning dissertation. A popular public speaker, she has published essays, book chapters, and popular blog pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences. Cooper Owens finished working with Teaching Tolerance and the Southern Poverty Law Center on a podcast series about how to teach U.S. slavery and was listed as an “acclaimed expert” on U.S. history by Time Magazine for the “The 25 Moments From American History That Matter Right Now.” Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017) won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the OAH as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history. Cooper Owens is also the director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is working on a second book project that examines mental illness during the era of American slavery and is writing a popular biography of Harriet Tubman.
Autumn Brown is a healing justice facilitator with over a decade of experience supporting organizational and strategic development with movement-building organizations. She has taught and presented around the US as a worker-owner at the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA), a cooperative devoted to strengthening movements for social justice. She was also a founding member of the Rock Dove Collective, a radical community health exchange in New York City. She serves on the board of directors of the Common Fire Foundation and Voices for Racial Justice. She is the cohost of the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, and an author of speculative fiction and creative non-fiction whose work has been published in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements and other publications.
Carla Maria Pérez is the founder and lead coordinator of the Healing Clinic Collective, which offers free traditional, non-industrial healing to some of the most vulnerable populations in the Bay Area. A dedicated mother and community organizer of Native Mezo American and Spanish heritage, she has worked on issues of environmental justice, healing justice, and permaculture with community groups in Mexico, El Salvador, and around the Bay Area, California. She is also dedicated to healing and spiritual work, as well as studying with her teachers around plant medicine, prayer, healing energy, and the traditional Mexican temazcal.
Jerry Tello is an internationally recognized authority in transformational healing, racial justice, and community peace and mobilization. Over the last forty years as a noted therapist, author, performer and program developer, Mr. Tello has incorporated his life experience, together with research-based knowledge, and indigenous, culturally-based teachings, to engage all in a reality-based healing and growth-inspiring experience. He is co-founder of the National Compadres Network and currently serves as director of training and capacity building. Additionally, he serves families and communities directly at the Sacred Circles Center in Whittier, California and is a member of the Sacred Circles performance group, which is dedicated to community peace and healing. Mr. Tello is the author of children’s books, professional publications, culturally-based curricula, motivational CD’s and other media. He has received numerous awards, including the Ambassador of Peace Award, White House Champions of Change Award, and Presidential Crime Victims Service Award.
Ray Warren Symposium on Race and Ethnic Studies is located in Miller Center on the Undergraduate Campus. MSC: 63
