For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers' rights. In 2012, shortly after one of WWAV's biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed their headquarters. Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth. Rooting WWAV in the geography of the South and the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers, McTighe and WWAV weave together stories from their founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina---with other movements for liberation as accomplices. Together, the authors refuse the logics of racial capitalism and share WWAV’s own world-building knowledges, as well as their methods for living these Black feminist futures now. Fire Dreams is a vital toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars, and all those who dream to make the world otherwise.

Laura McTighe is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University and the Cofounder of Women With A Vision’s research arm, Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans.

Deon Haywood is Executive Director of Women With A Vision, a New Orleans-based organization that has organized for Black feminist liberation in the South for decades.

Foreword / Deon Haywood  xiii
Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction. Born in Flames  1
1. Front Porch Strategy  29
2. Doing the Work  52
3. We Spoke Our Truths  95
4. Working with Fire  132
5. The Grounds  172
Epilogue. Forward Ever  210
Notes  225
Born in Flames Living Archive  265
Bibliography  277
Index  307