Autumn Brown is a Minneapolis-based artist, facilitator, mother, and theologian. The front woman of the eponymously named soul-pop band, AUTUMN, she is a queer, mixed-race Black woman, a gifted facilitator and orator, and a freedom worker who grounds her approach to building movements for liberation in her belief in the innate capacity for healing that emanates from the human heart.
From 2016 to 2024, Autumn was a facilitator with the Anti-Oppression Resource & Training Alliance (AORTA), a worker-owned cooperative devoted to strengthening movements for social justice and a solidarity economy through political education, training, and planning. Prior to joining AORTA, Autumn served as the Executive Director of RECLAIM!, a non-profit that works to increase access to mental health support so that queer and trans youth may reclaim their lives from oppression in all its forms. She was a founding member of the Rock Dove Collective, a radical community health exchange active in New York City from 2006-2012, and she is past president of the Board of Directors of Voices for Racial Justice.
Autumn brings 20 years of experience facilitating movement strategy, organizational and strategic development with community-based and social justice organizations, and training organizers in consensus process, facilitation, and racial justice. She has taught and presented in many places across the country, as well as internationally. She has worked with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Kairos Fellows, the American Civil Liberties Union, MPD150, and the Black Visions Collective, among many others.
Autumn is the recipient of the 2025 Margaret Brent Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and is a 2020 Auburn Seminary Lives of Commitment Honoree. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Autumn studied abroad at Oxford University, and pursued continuing education in Theology at the General Theological Seminary of New York. She is a speculative fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and her work has been published in journals, anthologies, and collected works of fiction and non-fiction. AUTUMN the band has released two EPs, The Animal in You and The Way Your Blood Beats, produced by Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards. Autumn is the author of Temper: Practicing Freedom in an Unfree World (St. Martin's Essentials, 2026).
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adrienne maree brown is a writer. She attended the Clarion Sci Fi Writers Workshopand the Hedgebrook Writers Residency in 2015, and Voices of Our Nation in 2014 as part of the inaugural Speculative Fiction Workshop. She was a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and a 2013 and 2015 Knights Arts Challenge winner, writing and generating science fiction in and about Detroit. She is currently the Ursula Le Guin Feminist Sci Fi Fellow, and a Sundance/Time Warner 2016 Artist Grant Recipient.
adrienne is the co-editor of the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements with Walidah Imarisha, published by AK Press in 2015. She has helped to cultivate work and thinking about Octavia Butler and Emergent Strategy, gathering a loose knit network of people interested in reading Octavia’s work from a political and strategic framework.
In terms of writing, adrienne blogs regularly on this site, and is a contributing editor for YES! magazine.
adrienne is the facilitator of the Detroit Narrative Agency (DNA), supporting Detroiters to shift the narratives of the city towards justice and liberation. DNA just announced it’s 2016 Cohort.
adrienne is in her fourth year of Somatics Teacher Training to deepen her healing, doula and facilitation work. She is part of the Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity team, at the intersection of political education, community organizing, somatics and black love.
She facilitates the internal healing and visionary development of organizations throughout the movement (most recently Building Equity and Alignment for Impact Initiative, Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Chorus Foundation, Correctional Association of NY, Young Women United, Positive Women’s Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, INCITE!, the Young Women’s Empowerment Project in Chicago, New Orleans Parents Organizing Network, ColorofChange.org and Detroit Summer).
In the past few years she has been a co-facilitator for the Detroit Food Justice Task Force, facilitator for Detroit Future, and the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. She has been a part of the faculty for the Center for Whole Communities. She partnered with Engage to facilitate a year-long Community of Practice on Networks and Decentralizing Leadership, 2011-2012.
adrienne was the executive director of The Ruckus Society from 2006-2010, and sat on their board through 2012. She was also a National Co-Coordinator for the 2010 US Social Forum.
Though she no longer serves on boards, adrienne is proud to have spent time on social justice organization boards including Allied Media Projects, Third Wave Foundation, and Common Fire, as well as many others.
A co-founder of the League of Pissed Off/Young Voters and graduate of the Somatics and Social Justice Cohort, Somatics and Trauma year-long, Rockwood’s Art of Leadership year-long training, and Robert Gass’s Art of Change year-long training, adrienne is obsessed with learning and developing models for action, community strength, movement building and transformation.
Email nandi at alliedmedia dot com to book adrienne as a writer, facilitator, singer, speaker, coach, or doula. Rates are negotiated based on the work needed.
More adrienne here.
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Zak Rosen (producer/editor) is a Detroit-based story maker. He is the creator and host Weirdly Helpful. With his wife, he created and hosts the podcast, Pregnant Pause with Zak and Shira, which chronicles their decision to bring a child into this strange world of ours.
His radio features have been heard on NPR, CBC, BBC, PRI, APM, Deutsche Welle and Radio Helsinki. Zak was a staff producer on PRX's State of the Re:Union and prior to that, a co-founding producer of WDET's Detroit Today.
More Zak here.
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