About Us
Dr. Loren Cahill, Co-Founder (she/her)
Loren S. Cahill is a scholar creative, organizer, cultural worker, popular educator, and womanist bibliophile from St. Louis. Her professional training is in Participatory Action Research (Tuck, 2009), Liberation Psychology (Braynt-Davis & Moore-Lobban, 2020), and Black Feminism (Taylor, 2017). Loren is an Assistant Professor at Smith College School for Social Work where she teaches courses on Community Organizing, Movement Building, Antiracism, and Critical Research Methods. Her research explores how self-expression and self-determination lead to healing and wellness in the individual and collective lives of Black people. The interventions living inside of Black activism, organizing, and art, provide the axis around which all of her scholarly pursuits rotate. Loren was also appointed the inaugural Scholar-In-Residence at The Colored Girls Museum in 2021. Loren is positively obsessed (Butler, 2011) with the ways that bodies, books, and built environments can offer freedom. She offers bibliotherapy and interior design consultation to support Black folks to reimagine liberation, healing, and joy.
chinyere okafor, co-founder (she/they/chi/he)
I am a Black queer reiki practitioner, writer, and somatic explorer. Raised in the Deep South and currently based on Lenape territory (a.k.a Brooklyn), I am now a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Social Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. My research seeks to understand how marginalized genders of color heal and resist, as well as examine where we hold stories of institutional violations in our physical and energetic bodies. I am a Reiki Level II practitioner trained under my Reiki godmother, Selome Araya. My training is of the Usui Reiki tradition, trauma-informed, and rooted in a decolonial Black feminist approach. I have offered Reiki to communities of color in New York for the past five years. I believe that everyone possesses the power to heal oneself and as a Reiki practitioner, I am here to provide energy work, hold space, and assist you on your journey back to self. It is an honor to be a witness and of service to your healing.
Tar Beach's Origin Story
We met on our interview day for our PhD program. Our friendship grew through the grief and joy we encountered while pursuing our degrees. We regularly hosted imagination parties where we dreamed of ways to steward Black feminism praxis accessibly to Black folks transnationally. To ground ourselves, we were constantly seeking the wisdom of elders and ancestors through texts, videos, altars, and conversations. Our dream took flight one day evening, after we met Faith Ringgold. She told us that she never intended to be a children's author but it was the only way she could get paid to do her art which she loved. Deeply inspired by Ringgold's words, we developed our own creative processes which can exist within and beyond our academic work. Over the past 8 years, we have stitched together a quilt of offerings that healed us and have begun to play with the patchwork to invite others to join us. We hope that you love Tar Beach as much as we do and that it encourages you to cite and build your own unique dream of freedom that lives inside of you.