WHAT IS LEFT TURN

Left Turn is a national network of activists engaged in exposing and fighting the consequences of global capitalism and imperialism. Rooted in a variety of social movements, we are anti-capitalists, radical feminists, anti-racists, queer and trans- liberationists, and anti-imperialists working to build resistance and alternatives to corporate power and empire.

Through our publication, Left Turn Magazine, our website and other forums, we seek to create spaces for our various movements to reflect and strategize. The magazine serves as a resource to grassroots movements by reporting on and analyzing local and global struggles for justice. It is an all volunteer publication written by activists for activists.

We are committed to modeling the world we want to see by organizing collectively, democratically and without hierarchy, both internally and in the larger movement. Whether working on a local community campaign or doing international solidarity work, we seek to fight all forms of oppression through our organizing.

We recognize the importance of struggles waged by people and communities most affected by the policies of globalization and empire, whether in Brooklyn or Baghdad. Through each aspect of our work we highlight these struggles and forge connections between them in order to build a stronger more effective movement here in the heart of the empire.

Finally, we wish to project politics of hope, inspiration and solidarity based on both the rich history of social movements and the visionary work of everyday people coming together to radically transform society and bring about a more just world.

To get a fuller picture of Left Turn, read our Five Year Anniversary and Ten Year Anniversary Editorials as well as Left Turn & The Movement: 2000–2010

 

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EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE

Walidah Imarisha is a writer and journalist, an educator, an organizer and a performance artist. She has facilitated poetry and journalism workshops third grade to twelfth, in community centers, youth detention facilities, and women’s prisons. Walidah also teaches in Portland State University’s Black Studies Department. She is the bad half of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista with Turiya Autry. One of the founders and first editor of the political hip hop publication AWOL Magazine, Walidah spent six years on the board of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. She helped to found the Human Rights Coalition, an organization of prisoners’ families and former prisoners with three chapters in Pennsylvania.  Walidah is also the director and co-producer of the Katrina documentary Finding Common Ground in New Orleans. www.walidah.com and www.goodsistabadsista.com.

Vasudha Desikan is a labor researcher and artist from NYC living in Washington DC. As the Art Editor, she seeks to showcase the work of new leftist artists and photographers in the magazine. Outside of Left Turn, Vasudha can be found wandering through the park with her vintage camera or learning Braavosi dance steps.

Tej Nagaraja, based in New York City, is Left Turn's reviews editor -- coordinating LT's unique takes on the latest releases. He is particularly proud of introducing the "Back in the Day" review to each issue, inviting writers and readers to take a fresh look at old(er) books, music, and especially movies including Strawberry and Chocolate, Born in Flames, Word is Out, When We Were Kings, and Salt of the Earth.

Rami El-Amine is a founding member of Left Turn magazine and currently a member of the editorial collective. He lives in Washington, DC where he has been active in both local and global struggles for almost 20 years. Much of his activism over the past 10 years, aside from raising two children who are movements unto themselves, has been around Palestine solidarity. In addition to covering issues related to Palestine, Israel, and US imperialism in the Middle East, his writing focuses on islamism and islamophobia. His full time work is in the labor movement.

Pranjal Tiwari has been on the Left Turn editorial collective since 2007 and is a recent transplant to Oakland, CA. Prior to this he lived in Hong Kong, where he was an organizer for a migrant domestic workers' union, was involved in local anti-gentrification campaigns, and helped with putting together an annual social justice-related film festival. He is also an independent writer and journalist whose work has appeared in ZNet, NewStandard, and various trade union publications. His Left Turn feature on Afghanistan was selected by Project Censored as one of the Top 25 Censored Stories of 2004. Aside from his work on the Left Turn editorial collective, Pranjal is an aspiring translator and has also written in the genre of science fiction for hundreds of years. He currently lives with a small brown dog and tries not to look at basilisks.

Morrigan Phillips is an organizer, writer, trainer and social worker living in Boston, MA. She has been, over the years, a campaign and direct action organizer against the IMF and World Bank, war in Iraq, the WTO and free trade. Aside from her work as an editor at Left Turn, Morrigan is the co-chair of the Prison Birth Project research committee, working to document the lives of mothers in Massachusetts prisons and a social worker supporting people in the HIV/AIDS community. In 2010, she was one half of the first all women duo to complete the 740 mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail. In her spare time Morrigan likes to draw complex theories of time travel on bar napkins. She can be found @mbotastic on Twitter.

Max Uhlenbeck is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. For the past four years he has worked at the Brecht Forum, a left movement center in Manhattan's West Village where he serves as the Director of Development specializing in grassroots fundraising strategies. When he is not on conference calls after work he is watching the San Francisco Giants defend their world series championship or playing poker with his friends from high school.

Jordan Flaherty is a New Orleans based journalist and organizer. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting has been featured in outlets from the New York Times to Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now!, and appeared as a guest on CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Keep Hope Alive with the Reverend Jesse Jackson.