Andrea Sterling: Black Feminist Radical Love, Interdependence, and the Practice of Community Care
Interviewed by: Lamont Jack Pearley
What can radical love teach us about the ways we care for one another, build community, and imagine freedom? Andrea M. Sterling is a writer, facilitator, scholar, and community cultural worker whose practice is rooted in a Black Feminist Radical Love Ethic, interdependence, and the belief that the self, our relationships, and the larger society are deeply connected. Drawing from more than twenty years of community and academic facilitation, Andrea uses writing, reflection, storytelling, and the concept of the “fractal” to examine how personal experiences can reveal larger cultural, social, and institutional patterns.
Her work moves fluidly across lived experience, history, popular culture, poetry, speculative fiction, and everyday encounters. Rather than simply diagnosing the problems that shape our communities, Andrea uses these materials to ask what liberated futures might look like and how we might begin practicing them now. Themes of care, rupture, identity, memory, divinity, collective responsibility, and wholeness continually emerge throughout her creative and scholarly work.
Andrea’s practice also extends beyond the page. Through workshops, writing circles, community conversations, and her longtime involvement with the Bloomington Poetry Slam, she creates spaces where questioning, listening, creativity, and connection become meaningful forms of cultural work. At the center of her practice is a commitment to understanding how deeply we depend upon one another—and how radical love, reflection, and community care can help us move toward greater freedom and collective possibility.
For October, The African American Folklorist is proud to recognize Andrea M. Sterling as our African American Folklorist of the Month.
