Welcome to House/Full of Black Women, a new hour-long special from The Kitchen Sisters, Ellen Sebastian Chang, Sital Muktari & PRX.

For some eight years now, 34 Black women from the Bay Area — artists, scholars, midwives, nurses, an architect, an ice cream maker, a donut maker, a theater director, a choreographer, musicians, educators, sex trafficking abolitionists and survivors have gathered monthly around a big dining room table in Oakland, California. Meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing — grappling with the issues of eviction, gentrification, well-being and sex trafficking that are staring down their community, staring down Black women in America.

Across these years, House/Full has created a series of performances and activations — street processions, street interventions, all-night song circles, historical narratives, parking lot ceremonies, rituals of resting and dreaming.

This House/Full Radio Special was inspired by the House/Full of Black Women project conceived and choreographed by Amara Tabor-Smith and co-directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang and an evolving collective of Black women artists and features interviews with sex trafficking abolitionists, personal stories of growing up in the Bay Area, music, Black women dreaming, resisting, insisting.

With Support From: The Creative Work Fund, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Kaleta Doolin Foundation, The Texas Women’s Foundation, Susan Sillins, listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions & PRX.

House/Full of Black Women is part of The Keepers series produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) in collaboration with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton and mixed by Jim McKee. House/Full of Black Women.

Pull up a chair. Take a listen.