Michelle PuckettMichelle Puckett was born into a working poor family in Dallas, Texas and was raised by a single mother. Her father died of a drug overdose when she was 9 years old and her little sister got pregnant at 16. Due to early experiences of living in poverty as a queer female, in addition to the rampant racism she grew up around, she has always yearned for, and worked towards, a more just world.
Beginning in kindergarten, she fell in love with poetry. Her love of the arts was nurtured by her grandmother, a photographer and painter, and by the opportunity to attend Dallas' public Arts Magnet High School. She got her first taste of direct action there as part of a week long sit in at the Dallas School Board building protesting funding cuts. After high school she worked a variety of working class jobs and eventually moved to Austin to canvass for the non-profit environmental organization, Clean Water Action. After a few years with CWA, she moved to Houston to help open a branch to fight the pollution of the refinery industry there. In 2003, she moved to Boulder, Colorado to pursue her BA in Poetry at the nation's only Buddhist college, Naropa University. Her activism grew as she served on the Student Union and co-founded a student group, Allies in Action, which worked toward racial justice through awareness raising campaigns, direct action, and agitation of the administration to diversify the curriculum and course requirements. In 2008, she moved to Oakland, California to continue her education where she earned her MFA in Poetry from Mills College. Michelle was the winner of the 2009 Mary Merritt Prize in Poetry and the 2011 Poetry Ark Prize. Her poems have appeared in Hot Metal Bridge, Bang Out San Francisco, The Walrus, Flaneur Foundry, The Poetry Ark, and Monkey Puzzle Magazine, and she has been anthologized in "Conversations in a Wartime Cafe: A Decade of War." She has given readings at a wide variety of venues across the Bay Area. With the poet Amber DiPietra, she co-curated the working [class] reading series out of her garage in Oakland, CA from 2010-2011. Michelle has been interviewed on the Black Panther Party's Kilu Nyasha's program "Freedom is a Constant Struggle," on KPFA's social justice magazine,"Making Contact," and on the Buddhist mindfulness podcast, "Everything is Workable." She is currently at work on a book of poems about an archive she found inside of her family’s boarding house where Lee Harvey Oswald was living at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy. Her great grandmother was his land lady and her aunt continues to live there. The poems use the archive to look at race, class, gender, and sexuality through the lens of the gaze into, and out of, that house. It is a beast to wrestle with, and she loves it, still. In the Bay Area, Michelle's commitment to justice work only deepened. She worked at ILRCSF, a disability rights organization, for 5 years after graduate school. During that time she helped the organization undertake the massive project of designing, fundraising for, building, and moving into a new, state-of-the-art, accessible community center designed by a Blind architect. During this period she participated in various movements, from Occupy Oakland to the struggle against police brutality in the wake of the killings of Oscar Grant and Alan Blueford. In 2012, she encountered the writings of Grace Lee Boggs and soon traveled to Michigan to attend the Detroit 2012 Conference where she was able to meet the legendary radical philosopher at the age of 96! Profoundly moved by the struggle of ordinary Detroiters working to "grow their souls" and "make a way out of no way" in preparation for the "{R}evolution," Michelle collaborated with the Boggs Center to co-design and co-lead the Detroit 2013, 2014, and 2015 conferences. These were gatherings of grassroots activists from around the nation coming together to study Grace's concept of "Visionary Organizing," rooted in the idea that we must be prepared to project a vision for what we want, not to simply resist what we don't. In 2015, following Grace's death at the age of 100, Michelle helped convene a consortium of organizers and non-profits in the Bay Area to design a four day program entitled, "Celebrating the Life of Grace Lee Boggs: A Century In Love and Struggle" to help spread Grace's ideas to organizers in the Bay. Michelle has twice led study groups on Grace's writings, and was a Fellow at the Boggs Center. Inspired by the example of Detroit, in 2014, Michelle began a Birth Doula training program and a year long Permaculture Design Course through the woman-led 13 Moon Collaborative. She wanted to move away from non-profit work and towards the more hands-on skills that would be necessary in a post-capitalist, post-climate change world. She is currently in her third year of Doula work, and her second year of growing a garden and building her soil in the communal village where she lives in Richmond, California. Very near the Chevron Refinery, and only a mile and a half from the Bay, her home and surrounding community continue to keep climate change in the forefront of her consciousness. On election day, 2016, she traveled to Standing Rock to participate in direct action against the Dakota Access Pipe Line, risk arrest, and pray with the Water Protectors. Upon returning to the Bay she helped organize a 24 Hour Interfaith Prayer Vigil at West Berkeley's Shellmound, burial site of the very first people of this land, which is threatened with development. She has also participated in direct actions to stop the development of the Gill Tract Farm under Indigenous leadership. A lay-leader at First Congregational Church of Oakland, Michelle's spiritual practices include Buddhist mindfulness meditation, earth-based spirituality, and prayer and service in the world as a follower of the radical Jesus. She frequently participates in direct action against the militarization of police, the displacement of the poor and people of color, and environmental plunder. As a member of #Interfaith4BlackLives, Michelle works with folks, across faith, who are called by their Creator to live into a more just and beautiful world which centers the needs of the most marginalized as part of their path to living in Beloved Community. |