Alta Starr

is currently the director of training for Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), and is a somatic practitioner or “aliveness doula,” writer, and poet. She spent 25 years as a grant-maker supporting organizing and social movements to build political power in underserved and marginalized U.S. communities, especially in the South. Her own political engagement began in the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, and informed her early work as a teacher, parent organizer, and radio news and music producer. She has published essays about embodiment, including the introductory chapter to the book Making and Being, a textbook for undergraduate students in the visual arts. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Conjugating Freedom, a collection of essays and poems examining freedom as an embodied experience. She is based in New York and speaks English.