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Honorable Mention, Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize

Honorable Mention, Small Orange Press Emerging Woman Poet

Fellow, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop

Breathe into Believing

“The hook-up”: How youth-serving organizations facilitate network-based social capital for urban youth of color

A scholar, educator, and poet, Dr. LeConté J. Dill is an Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Guided by Black Feminist epistemologies and using qualitative and arts-based research methods, Dr. Dill has a commitment toward transdisciplinary, community-accountable scholarship. Her work focuses on the safety, resilience, and wellness strategies of urban Black girls and other youth of color.

Born and raised in South Central L.A., Dr. Dill earned her B.A. in Sociology from Spelman College, her Master of Public Health degree in Community Health Sciences from the University of California Los Angeles, her Doctor of Public Health degree from the University of California Berkeley, and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Health Policy in the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine. Her scholarship is critically informed by years of working in partnership with youth and community organizers, health educators, and policy advocates at community-based organizations and public health departments on issues related to chronic disease prevention, violence intervention, and juvenile justice. A Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, Dr. Dill also previously served on the faculty at several schools and programs of public health across the U.S.

Dr. Dill has been writing creatively from a young age. She was a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Fellow in 2016, a Small Orange Press Emerging Woman Poet Honorable Mention in 2019, and an Honorable Mention for the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize in 2021. Dr. Dill also integrates poetry into her ethnographic research with participants in what she has coined as “participatory narrative analysis.” Dr. Dill’s scholarly and creative works have been published in a diverse array of spaces, such as the Du Bois Review, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Adolescent Research, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Poetry Magazine, The Feminist Wire, and Mom Egg Review.

Dr. Dill is deeply committed to teaching and mentoring. She actively works to amplify students as co-learners and co-scholars. Recently certified as a mindfulness instructor, Dr. Dill’s emerging work around “centering wellness” integrates meditation, poetry, and somatics for students, other researchers, and community partners.

Black Feminist Theory

African Studies

African American Studies

Mindfulness

Michigan State University Faculty Profile

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MSU African American and African Studies “unicorns” drive Black futures beyond survival into wellness

Associate Professor of African American and African Studies

Alison & Stan are joined by LeConté... Stan’s friend from undergrad at the AUC. Together, they reflect on mentorship, learning to play, interrogating and redefining what we’ve been taught about taking care of ourselves, and what learning and unlearning looks like at different stages of life. What’s up for LeConté is the urban ethnography of the Wu-Tang Clan, for Stan, it’s some nonsense about tights and for Alison, private retreats and coming close to what brings the most joy.

LEARNING: A Conversation with LeConté

Bringing together poets, artists, and health scholars to discuss issues of justice and equity as it relates to race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in observance of National Minority Health Month and National Poetry Month.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Health Equity and Jason Mendez, Block Chronicles.  

Bios:

Dr. Tameka Cage Conley  is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in Fiction. Her work is published in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, The African American Review and elsewhere. She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father--an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in northern Louisiana. An excerpt of the novel is forthcoming in the Spring 2021 edition of The Iowa Review. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oxford College of Emory University. 

Dr. LeConté Dill is a native of South Central Los Angeles and is currently creating a homeplace in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. She is a community-accountable scholar, educator, and poet. Dr. Dill holds degrees from Spelman College, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of California Berkeley. Guided by Black Feminist epistemologies and using qualitative and arts-based research methods, she has a commitment toward transdisciplinary research. Dr. Dill listens to and shows up for urban Black girls and other youth of color and works to rigorously document their experiences of violence, safety, resistance, and wellness. Currently, she is the Director of Public Health Practice and a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University. Additionally, since 2015, she has been a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Dr. Ryan J. Petteway is a social epidemiologist and assistant professor in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. His applied research integrates social epidemiology, critical theory, decolonizing methods, and CBPR/YPAR to examine notions of place, embodiment, and “placemaking” in community health. More broadly, his scholarship engages: 1) notions of epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice within public health knowledge production, and 2) applications of critical theory to examine dominant discourse/narrative frames of “health equity”. Dr. Petteway is also an award-winning poet. His poem “TOGETHER//Untethered”, was awarded an April 2020 National Poetry Month Prize—and nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize. His poem, “LATENT//Missing”, was published by Health Education & Behavior in August 2020, representing the first poem published within a major public health journal as an expression of public health science/scholarship. The piece was recently honored with their 2020 Lawrence W. Green Paper of the Year Award.

Mateo Perez Lara is a queer, non-binary, Latinx poet from California. They received their M.F.A. in Poetry as part of the first cohort to graduate from Randolph College’s Creative Writing Program. They have a chapbook, Glitter Gods, published with Thirty West Publishing House. As a queer, latinx person, they hope to elevate not only their voice but the voice/s of the communities in which they are from and hold solidarity for.

Joseph Capehart is a nationally acclaimed poet, speaker, host, educator, and community organizer. Liberian by way of Minneapolis, MN, they hold an MFA in
Poetry from Randolph College. Joseph's work appears in multiple print publications and their poetry videos have been featured across the internet with Button Poetry and MTV, among others. They currently live in Brooklyn, NY where they serve as a 7th grade Reading Teacher.

Poetic Health Justice Forum

Despite calls from the #cancelrent movement, there has been no substantial housing legislation in New York since March, and evictions are piling up by the thousand. COVID may have accelerated these crises, but it didn't start them—gentrification, eviction, and real estate development have long been working in tandem to atrophy Black, Latinx, and working class neighborhoods and communities. 

Join us for a panel that provides both historical context and present-day understanding of the fractured state of housing in 2020, and addresses how we can best advocate for the shelter and housing of all New Yorkers. How can we protect ourselves and our neighbors from predatory landlords and developers? What are tenant unions, and how can collective action be most effective? Which housing policies have led us to where we are today—and which changes must we demand for the future? 

Confirmed speakers:

Dr. LeConté Dill was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles and is now creating a homeplace in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. She is a community-accountable scholar, educator, and poet, with degrees from Spelman College, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. Committed to practicing what she names as #CrunkPublicHealth, Dr. Dill's work documents experiences of violence, safety, resistance, and wellness among urban Black girls and other youth of color. Currently, she is the Director of Public Health Practice and a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University. 

Michael Hollingsworth is a lifelong Brooklynite and resident of Council District 35. A Son, Brother, Uncle, Friend, Neighbor, Artist, Baker, and Tenant. A graphic designer by day, Tenant Organizer, Community Advocate, Housing Advocate, and Activist the rest of the time. A REAL housing justice fighter running for City Council to represent Bed-Stuy, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Fort Greene, and Crown Heights.

Samuel Stein is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Community Service Society. His work has been published in scholarly journals, popular media outlets and edited volumes, and in 2019, Verso published his first book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. He is a member of the steering committee for the Planners Network, the organization of progressive planning.

Cea Weaver is the campaign coordinator of Housing Justice for All - a coalition of over 80 groups representing tenants and homeless New Yorkers across the State of New York. Cea has worked together with legislative leaders and community partners to pass transformative tenants' rights policy at the local and State level. She has a Masters in Urban Planning from NYU.

Housing Justice: Community, Gentrification, Eviction, and the Pandemic

As the U.S. grapples anew with centuries of systemic racism and police brutality, imagining effective and sustainable solutions will demand innovative approaches. Join a provocative conversation with several of the nation’s leading experts and scholars to explore what it will really take to reimagine public safety for all Americans.

Panelists:

Dr. Hannah Cooper, Professor of Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences, Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University

David Norman, Research Assistant, and Committee Advisor to the "Incarceration and Public Health Action Network" (IPHAN), Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University

Dr. Alyasah A. Sewell, Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University and Founder and Director of The Race and Policing Project

Kanwarpal Dhaliwal, Co-founder and Associate Director at the RYSE Youth Center

Moderated by:

Dr. LeConté Dill, Director of Public Health Practice and Clinical Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, NYU GPH

Police Brutality and Reform Through a Public Health Lens

APHA FINAL

Dr. Leconte Dill, Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at State University of New York Downstate, talks about social inequalities in adolescents.

Public Health Minute with Dr. William Latimer: Dr. Leconte Dill

Science of Grief is a series of community conversations that explores multiple forms of grief while featuring scientific research, poetry, art and performance. The program responds to the idea that grief comes at different hours, for different people, and everyone deserves a listening ear.

This program video features a conversation with Dr. LeConté Dill. Dr. Dill is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. In her work as a community-accountable scholar, educator, and poet, she listens to and shows up for urban Black girls and works to rigorously document their experiences of safety, resilience, resistance, and wellness.

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