Our mission:

Our values:

• Liberation rooted in self-determination and solidarity.
• Radical imagination and creativity.
• Moving with care and curiosity.
• Abundance in community.

Our theory of change:

• Right relation: We are in a generative, reciprocal relationship with community, organizers, and movements.
• Community-driven reporting: Our reporting and storytelling are informed and driven by the needs of our community including our partners. Our community trusts us to share their stories and as a source of information because of the relationships we've built with them.
• Outcomes: Storytelling or reporting leads to policy changes, support to movement work, narrative shift, increased solidarity and connection, the nourishing of radical imagination, and the creation of pathways to careers in journalism, literature, and the arts for people who have not traditionally had access.
• Impact: Repeated outcomes from Scalawag and other reporting media makers in conjunction with the work of movements leads to transformational change.

Our team:

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Cierra Hinton — Executive Director-Publisher

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Cierra has an undying love and passion for the complicated South, which she brings to her work at Scalawag where she oversees our operations and big-picture plans. Cierra has found community across the South—from Tennessee to Mississippi—but currently resides in Durham, North Carolina.

Sherronda J. Brown — Editor-in-Chief

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Sherronda is a Southern-grown gothic nerd and queermongering gender anarchist. As a versatile creator, they lend their talents to multiple spheres as an essayist, editor, storyteller, creative consultant, and artist. They are also the author of the award-winning book, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture. Alongside queer theory and sexual politics, their writing often focuses on cultural critique and media analysis, especially of the horror genre. As Scalawag's first Editor-in-Chief, Sherronda strives to lead our editorial team with empathy and passion to inspire imaginative resistance, radical creativity, and cathartic experience.

Da'Shaun Harrison — Editor-at-Large

Da'Shaun is a trans theorist and Southern-born and bred abolitionist in Atlanta, Georgia. They are the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which was awarded the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, among several other honors. Harrison uses their extensive history as a community organizer—which began in 2014 during their first year at Morehouse College—to frame their political thought and cultural criticism. Through the lens of what they call "Black Fat Studies," Harrison lectures on blackness, fatness, gender, and their intersections. 

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Zaire Love — Creative Director

Zaire is an award-winning filmmaker, music maker, writer, and educator whose mission is to honor, amplify, and archive the stories and voices of the Black South. She is also Scalawag's first-ever Creative Director. Her life's work brings honor to the Black South, its people, its traditions, and its cultures in the past, present, and future. Catch her living her best life, loving her folks deeply, and leaving trails of flyness in every room she's in 'cause "she from Memphis!"

Ko Bragg — Newsletter Editor

Ko is a reporter and editor with a focus on justice and the criminal-legal system in the Deep South. She also writes and edits our newsletter, pop justice. Ko is based in New Orleans, where she is always on the hunt for oysters, but will always consider Mississippi home.

alyzza may — Development Officer

alyzza is an angelic troublemaker, moving in the lineages of cultural workers, popular educators, and community builders alike. Focuses of theirs include: Mutual aid, participatory budgeting, curating community-engaged murals, and, most recently, helping launch Freedom Fridges. alyzza is a former member of Cakalak Thunder, and a proud Titi to two puntastic twins.