katie robinson
writer - facilitator - artist
"We are what we think we are, we are what we never considered we could be, and we are a mystery, all at once."
from "Here's How I Let Them Come Close"
TLDR
Writer, facilitator, educator, scholar, interdisciplinary artist, wanderer, enchanted. Wife, Auntie, Bff. Sagittarius sun, Taurus rising, Cancer moon. XNFP. Enneagram 4. Thinks too deeply. Takes too many baths. Episodic texter. Probably loves you.
short
katie robinson (any pronouns) is a writer, facilitator, educator, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist devoted to the exploration of what is present and possible outside of the white supremacist colonial imagination. Their essay, “Here’s How I Let Them Come Close,” a meditation on encounters, extraterrestrials, and the creative process, was featured in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars from Milkweed in 2023. They are currently a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where they are writing a dissertation at the intersections of depth psychology, decoloniality, and police and prison abolition.
Long
​For over ten years, katie (any pronouns) has engaged the intersections of the arts, relational skills, and psychologies of trauma, harm, and healing. This has looked like creating and sharing literary, visual, and theater art, crafting and delivering tailored trainings and workshops, generating trans-ontological scholarship, and facilitating groups working toward racial justice and abolition.
Central to katie's work is the notion that, to borrow from Courage of Care, "the crises of our time are relational crises." We have been intentionally sold the (convincing) lie of an isolatable, categorizable world - we are separate from one another, from more-than-human beings, from our dead and our not yet embodied, from the earth, from the universe, from our agency, from our power, from our inherent belonging, from our inherent sacredness. Decolonial philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres says coloniality of being, the imprint left by our individual and collective sense of self by colonization, "turns a potential world of human relations into one of permament forms of conquest, colonialism, and war", in what amounts to "metaphysical catastrophe" (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p. 12).
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katie's art, professional, and scholarly work wonders, what might it take to return to a state of relational possibility and exploratory intimacy? What helps us remember our collective body? What metaphysics is needed? How might new stories about about reality, about what we are and are capable of, stories outside those told those by racial capitalism, white supremacy culture, and coloniality, design worlds that nourish life in its unending heterogeneity?
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Through the years, katie has learned that these questions aren't theoretical or unanswearble, and can be explored through the curation of learning experiences, and through the practice of relational skills. Compassion and love are not abstract, but do in fact consist of learnable and teachable skills, appropriate for all ages and settings. At the crux of sex ed, harm reduction, trauma and somatic studies, abolition, and decolonial philosophy exist bounties of wisdom, and practices customizable for any group seeking to dismantle systemic oppression by way of their immediate relationships.
katie mistrusts shame- and fear- based stories about who any of us are, and is committed to the rediscovery and recovery of relational possibility that narrates/creates our world(s) in a manner most hostpitable to life. This commitment can morph itself into whatever work is called for: poetry and art, pedagogy and curriculum, narrative strategy and relational organizing, ontological shift and reality building, trauma healing and group processes.
Why
As the crises crescendo, so must our approaches to dealing, healing, knowing, resisting, and relating. As we imagine and enact new worlds, so must we imagine and enact new approaches. What else is possible? What stories serve us best? What yet unnamed work is needed? What might be different than it appears? How free can we get?
