About

Dr. Renée Byrd is a Black feminist educator, artist, activist-scholar, farmer, poet and mom. She began doing work around mass incarceration in 2001 as a legal advocate for seriously and terminally ill prisoners in California women’s prisons with a non-profit called Justice Now in Oakland, CA. The imprisoned people she met with Justice Now forever changed her life and led her to nearly 25 years of community organizing, scholarship and social service work with current and formerly incarcerated people. 

She is an Associate Professor of English at Cal Poly Humboldt and proudly comes from a long line of Black farmers. Building on the land-based legacy of her ancestors, she is the founder of Earthseed Laboratories. Earthseed is an emerging forest farm and healing justice space where folks with histories of incarceration and movement co-conspirators can come to slow down, break bread, restore ourselves and practice new ways of being in the world. While critique remains vital, Dr. Byrd’s work has made a generative turn toward experimenting with practices for abolition futures. Our understanding is deepening about the ways that racial capitalism and the carceral state have always held within them the seeds of their own demise. What are the more liberatory futures we are growing from the ashes?

Renée’s healing justice work is rooted in African diasporic spiritualities, particularly Southern hoodoo, as well as the Cycle of Transformation lineage of the Last Mask Center. Finding ways to bring her anti-prison work together with spiritual ecologies is pushing her in new directions. She is currently at work on a series of altar installations exploring the reproduction of violence, the afterlives of slavery and the materiality of healing ancestral lines.

At Cal Poly Humboldt she is spearheading an innovative new program in Critical Agriculture Studies, a transdisciplinary major disturbing the boundaries between the humanities, arts, and sciences. The program teaches hands-on farm training, while asking about the possibilities unleashed when we combine, for example, critical theory, poetry and soil science. Students will learn best practices in regenerative and climate-just agriculture, while also developing a critical analysis of colonialism, land theft, property relations, enslavement and their relationship to discourses on farming, cultivation, ‘civilization’, and agriculture. The program will give students the practical and theoretical tools to enact a climate-just vision, transforming communities as they transform how our food, medicine, fiber, and flowers are cultivated.