Join us for the second edition launch of Tenderness: A Black Queer Meditation on Softness and Rage by Annika Hansteen-Izora, presented with Co—Conspirator Press and the Feminist Center for Creative Work.

The book provides readers with a critical inquiry on the meanings and uses of tenderness, and unfolds the potentials of tenderness as a tool, a healing agent, and source of radical change. In the second edition, the author has returned with an updated title to the work, and a new preface that further emphasizes the importance of tenderness, in the face of many on-going struggles since it was first written in the early pandemic.

This special evening will feature Annika Hansteen-Izora in conversation with Niki Franco, a Caribbean abolitionist community organizer and writer. Look forward to an interactive event with readings from the book, prompt engagement between audience and text, and a mini-workshop exploring themes of critical softness, Black queer imagination, and love as an action through collaborative conversation.

Please gather with us to celebrate the second release of this beautiful work and participate in a thoughtful workshop on tenderness, softness, and rage!

This is a masked event. Email news@printedmatter.org to RSVP. If capacity is reached, you may be added to a waitlist.

Annika Hansteen-Izora is a multimodal writer, designer, and artist. Their work explores the radical potential of communal dreaming, tenderness, and care in conversation with queer Black futurity. Through threads of writing, collectivity, and technology, Annika facilitates gathering as a tool for pulling the futures we dream of into the present. Their debut work Tenderness, published by Co-Conspirator press, calls upon tenderness as a radical for both joy and rage through a queer Black lens. You can find them by your nearest body of water.

Niki Franco is a Caribbean abolitionist community organizer, writer, podcast host, and facilitator of spaces for collective study. Her work experiments with truth-telling, radical history and thought, pleasure, joy, and radical imagination. She served as a co-founding director of QTBIPOC art collective, (F)empower and their associated bail fund, as a lead organizer in Miami fighting for youth education rights against policing and privatization, she’s the co-creator of the award-winning short film, Every Step is a Prayer, and is the host of podcast, Getting to the Root of it with Venus Roots.

Join us for a program presented by Feminist Center for Creative Work / Co–Conspirator Press on the occasion of the second edition of Tenderness: A Black Queer Meditation on Softness and Rage by Annika Hansteen-Izora. This second edition has all the original content from the first edition with more to explore, including a new preface from the author.

Annika Hansteen-Izora will read from Tenderness, followed by an audience Q&A moderated by Aliyah Blackmore. After the reading, guests will gather into groups to explore questions of tenderness proposed in the publication.

About the book What would it mean if tenderness could hold a simultaneous existence of joy and rage? How to call on tenderness as a practice of love, rather than a regurgitation of white supremacy? Author and writer Annika Hansteen-Izora explores answers in Tenderness: A Black Queer Meditation on Softness and Rage. A meditation, critical inquiry, and invitation to expand our imaginations on meanings of tenderness, this piece calls into question conceptions of tenderness that are rooted in desirability, anti-Blackness and white supremacy, and instead unfolds the potentials of tenderness as a tool, a balm, a healing agent, and a question to lean into.

Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Written by Annika Hansteen-Izora. Copy Edited by Aliyah Blackmore. Designed and Illustrated by MJ Balvanera. Risograph printed by Neko Natalia. Bound by South Gate Bindery.