How We Got Here

Artists, it has fallen to us to live in interesting times. It could be a blip, but it could be that everything we have ever done and thought and learned comes to this: WHAT WILL WE DO ABOUT IT? With this project, we want to declare that above all else, we will not give up quietly, and we will not leave the vulnerable behind. We will give a fuck. We will lift people up. We will stand shoulder to shoulder, head to head, to demand a better, kinder reality. In celebrating our collective strength, we will make sure there is something left to celebrate when the dust settles.

The term HOPEPUNK to refer to speculative fiction that focuses on hope and community was coined by author Alexandra Rowland in 2017, but it isn’t new. Octavia Butler’s work, especially the Earthseed series, is hopepunk. Adrian Tchaikovsky, Becky Chambers, Amal El-Mohtar, and many others have written hopeful, community-based, found-family, We-Will-Not-Run fiction. In addition, we are inspired by the writers, distributors, and readers of forbidden samizdat in the former Soviet Union and stretching along a long historical line of writers and readers who have lived under oppressive regimes and used poems, stories, and essays to connect, to organize, to find freedom and light together in the shadows.