Join MoAD’s Chef-in-Residence, Bryant Terry, for a timely two-day summit inspired by his latest book Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora. The weekend will feature thought-provoking panels at MoAD (navigating the ins and outs of publishing, telling compelling stories, effectively using design) followed by a reception with sips, bites, and records spun by DJ Max Champ.

The following day we will gather at the TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, just outside of San Francisco, for a day of experiential learning and communal leisure (hikes, contemplative writing, gardening, breathwork, and equine activities), including the premiere of Rhythms of the Land, a film by Dr. Gail P. Myers. We will end the day with a community supper made by some of the Bay Area’s most talented Black chefs.

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Featured presenters and chefs include: Tricia Hersey (The Nap Bishop), Nicole Taylor, Osayi Endolyn, Psyche Williams-Forson, Matt Horn, George McCalman, Gail Myers, Natalie Baszile, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Jamia Wilson, Porscha Burke, Alice Grandoit, Rachel Konte, Kanchan Hunter, and Chris Pearson.

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Friday September 9th - 9am to 7pm

In-person at MoAD

685 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

Virtual livestream available for Friday events.

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Saturday September 10th - 10:30am to 7pm

In-person at TomKat Ranch

2997 Pescadero Creek Rd, Pescadero, CA 94060

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Proof of vaccination is required to attend all events during the two-day summit. Masks will be required in all indoor areas.

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MoAD members receive a 20% discount on tickets. Please contact membership@moadsf.org for your member discount code.

Not a member? Become a member today here.

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Event Schedule

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Friday, September 9
Publishing: Design + Storytelling

*scrolldown for presenter bios

9:00am-10:00am: Registration, coffee & pastries

10:00am-10:10am: Opening Ceremony led by Ashara Ekundayo
10:10am-10:30am: Opening remarks by MoAD Director of Public Programs, Elizabeth Gessel; and MoAD Chef-in-Residence, Bryant Terry

10:30am-11:00am: Elder Keynote by Dr. Gail P. Myers

11:15am-12:15pm: Storytelling with Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Marvin K. White, Osayi Endolyn, Psyche Williams-Forson (moderator)

12:30pm-1:30pm: Lunch break - local options (lunch not provided)

1:45pm-2:45pm: Navigating the Publishing World with Jamia Wilson, Nicole Taylor, Bryant Terry, Porscha Burke (moderator)

3:00pm-4:00pm: Design with George McCalman, Alice Grandoit, Rachel Konte, Brandi Summers (moderator)

4:00pm-4:45pm: Feedback, Q&A, Closing

5:00pm-7:00pm: Sips, Bites and Sounds with DJMax Champ

Saturday, September 10
Rest, Rejuvenation, Leisure

8:30am: Meet at MoAD

9:00am: Bus leaves to TomKat Ranch

10:30am-11:00am: Check-in, smoothies & snacks

11:00am-12:30pm: Collective Rest and Healing Experience with The Nap Ministry’s, Tricia Hersey. A collective moment of guided rest through daydreaming and sound.

12:45pm-1:45pm: Lunch provided by Bi-Rite Family of Businesses

2:00pm-4:30pm: Choose two of your favorite concurrent activities to participate in:

Film Screening & Discussion: Rhythms of the Land with Gail Myers & Natalie Baszile‍

Rhythms of the Land is a valentine to generations of Black farmers in the United States from the enslavement period to the present, whose intense love of the land and dedication to community enabled them to survive against overwhelming odds.

Adaptogens and the Art of Neuro-Relaxation with Kanchan Dawn Hunter

An exploration of adaptogenic plants and how they help us restore our precious nervous system.

Breathwork with Chris Pearson

A reclamation of our breath and our sovereignty. We will embrace the friction created by breath and touch it with conscious attention.

Contemplative Writing with Amber Butts

This workshop offers creative storytelling, play and the body as access points to practicing mutuality and interdependence within nature. Instead of the Western and white supremacist concept that humans exist outside of the natural world, participants will incorporate their senses (smell, sound, and taste) as roadmaps towards reconciliation, decolonization, freedom and belonging with non-human beings.

Field Walk with TomKat Ranch‍

A walk on TomKat Ranch to learn about regenerative ranching and observe the impacts of the ranch’s various herds working together to benefit the land and animals.

Gallop with TomKat Ranch

With horses as the teachers and guides, participants will engage with the ranch’s horses in carefully-designed activities to discover new strengths and awareness. Working with the herd, you will quickly discover there are no wiser, fairer, or more patient mentors. Riding horses is not included in this activity.

5:00pm-7:00pm: Dinner by local Bay Area chefs + a performance by the Kev Choice Ensemble

7:15pm: Bus returns to MoAD

Black Food Summit Presenters

‍Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel, Queen Sugar, which is being adapted for a seventh television season by writer/director Ava DuVernay, and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. QueenSugar was named one of the San Francisco Chronicles’ Best Books of2014, was long-listed for the Crooks Corner Southern Book Prize, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. In her new non-fiction book, We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land & Legacy, Natalie brings together essays, poems, conversations, portraits, and first-person narratives to tell the story of Black people’s connection to the land from Emancipation to the present. Natalie has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Djerassi Resident Arts Program where she received the SFFILM and the Bonnie Rattner Fellowships. Her non-fiction work has appeared in National Geographic, The Bitter Southerner, O, The Oprah Magazine, and a number of anthologies. Natalie lives in San Francisco.

Porscha Burke is Director, Strategic Projects and Senior Editor-at-Large at Random House. Over her eighteen years in trade book publishing, she has acquired works by Maya Angelou, Jon Meacham, Candice Benbow, and Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., and published new editions of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Black Book, originally edited by Toni Morrison. An inaugural member of Penguin Random House’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council (and a Queens, New York native), Porscha received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College, where she currently teaches.

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Amber Butts is a storyteller, cultural strategist, grief worker and scholar of delight. Amber's practices are rooted in building reparative, joyful and interdependent relationships between the living Earth and all of its beings. Her role as a steward, listener and beginner have taught her that spaces centered in tenderness, nuance, and care are freedom playgrounds. Her favorite freedom practice is observing the ways non-human beings organize to confront power and protect one another. Though her writing has been featured in dozens of publications around the world, her most cherished, sacred identity is being Audrie Lowe's granddaughter. Amber lives in Oakland and is currently at work on an intergenerational speculative fiction novel.

Ashara Ekundayo is an independent curator, artist, cultural theologian, creative industries entrepreneur and organizer working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces. Through her company AECreative Consulting Partners she places artists and cultural production as essential in equitable design practices, real estate development, and movement-building. She also serves as Cultural Strategist for Chef Bryant Terry’s 4Color Books, an imprint of Ten Speed Press.

Osayi Endolyn is a James Beard Award-winning writer, editorial consultant, producer, and cultural commentator. Her approach to storytelling explores the nexus of food, identity, music, and art and is featured in many publications including the New York Times, Food & Wine, and Travel + Leisure. Osayi is co-author of Black Power Kitchen, the imminent cookbook from Ghetto Gastro, and the bestseller The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food from Marcus Samuelsson. Her own narrative book on American restaurants and dining culture is forthcoming at Amistad/HarperCollins. 

Alice Grandoit-Šutka (she/her) is a research based designer, host, and publisher. Over the past 15 years she has developed an expansive practice that is equal parts experimental, referential, and relational existing at the intersections of the arts, community engagement and food. Among these expressions Alice is interested in building infrastructures for convening that open up our capacity to feel deeply and orient towards liberatory futures. She is Co-Founder and Editorial Director of Deem Journal, a media platform exploring design as social practice and a host at Tombo, a Copenhagen based food practice where she instigates social and environmentally responsive hospitality.

Tricia Hersey is a Chicago native with over 20 years of experience as a multidisciplinary artist, writer, theologian and community organizer. She is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations by curating spaces for the community to rest via community rest activations, immersive workshops,  performance art installations, and social media.  She is the author of the upcoming book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto which will be published in October 2022. 

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Since opening Horn Barbecue in October 2020, and Kowbird in January 2022, Chef and Pit master Matt Horn has consistently delivered a standard of excellence that has catapulted him to the forefront of the barbecue movement and the restaurant industry.  Guests wait in lines that wrap Oakland blocks to dig into both Horn Barbecue and Kowbird's mouthwatering meats and decadent sides. Chef Horn also has future projects in the pipeline for this year that will equally impress. Media and critics have celebrated Chef Horn’s West Coast style barbecue, awarding Horn Barbecue a Michelin Bib Gourmand (2021); James Beard Awards nomination for Best New Restaurant (2022); Food & Wine Best New Chef (2021); and SF Chronicle Rising Star Chef (2019), among other accolades.  

Kanchan Dawn Hunter is an Earth Steward in the realms of herbal medicine, food farming, and education. She is the former Co-Director of Spiral Gardens in Berkeley where she served for 18 years.

Rachel Konte has been the Chief of Design for Red Bay Coffee Roasters since 2014, and part of the founding team with her husband, Keba Konte. She is an Afro Danish-born designer with 18 years of international design experience in the apparel and denim industry, last as Design Director for Levi Strauss & Co in San Francisco. She is also owner and designer of her own brand OwlNWood and co-owns and designs All Power To The People Project with co-founder Fredrika Newton.

‍George McCalman is an artist and creative director. His studio, McCalman.Co, designs brands for a range of cultural clientele. Additionally, he’s a visual columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, featured in “Observed” and “First Person.” His first book, Illustrated Black History, will be published by Amistad/HarperCollins in September 2022.

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Sarah Ladipo Manyika is a writer of novels, short stories and essays translated into several languages. She is author of the best-selling novel In Dependence (2009) and multiple shortlisted novel Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), and has had work published in publications including Granta, The Guardian, the Washington Post and Transfuge among others. Sarah serves as Board Chair for the women’s writing residency, Hedgebrook; she was previously Board Director for the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; and has been a judge for the Goldsmiths Prize, California Book Awards, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and Chair of judges for the Pan-African Etisalat Prize. Sarah is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

For over 20 years, cultural anthropologist Dr. Gail P. Myers has researched, lectured, written about and recently filmed stories of African American farmers, sharecroppers, and gardeners. In 2004, Dr. Myers co-founded Farms to Grow, Inc. in Oakland, CA to work in partnership with Black farmers to sustain their farms, launching the Freedom Farmers Market in 2013. Her upcoming documentary, Rhythms of the Land, celebrates the life stories of Black farmers, will be released summer 2022.  

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Chris Pearson is a Blackupunturist and Self Mastery practitioner practicing in Oakland at Be Well Natural. Chris uses metacognitive mindfulness practices to address the pursuit of optimal wellness. Through the exploration of, how does who you are impact what you experience and how does what you experience impact who you are, Chris supports making connections to daily practices that bring about calm and a sense of overall well-being.

Brandi T. Summers, PhDis associate professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington, D.C., and the way that competing notions of blackness structure economic relations and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her current project explores the roots and routes of Black resistance that laid a foundation for the current affective economies organized to reclaim space through public cultures, politics, and the aesthetics of Black life in her hometown, Oakland, California.

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 Nicole A. Taylor is a James Beard Award–nominated food writer, master home cook, and producer. She has written for the New York Times, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine. Nicole is the author of The Up South Cookbook and The Last O.G. Cookbook. She is the executive producer of If We So Choose, a short documentary about the desegregation of an iconic southern fast food joint. Nicole is the cofounder of The Maroon, a marketplace and retreat house focused on radical rest for Black creatives. She lives in NewYork City and Athens, Georgia, with her husband and son.

Bryant Terry is a James Beard & NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author renowned for his activism to create a healthy, just, and sustainable food system. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of 4 Color Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House and Ten Speed Press, and he is co-principal and innovation director of Zenmi, a creative studio he founded. Since 2015 he has been the Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco where he creates public programming at the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, and culture. His sixth book, a collection of recipes, art, and stories, entitled Black Food was published by 4 Color Books/Ten Speed Press in October 2021. It went on to be the most critically acclaimed American cookbook published that year landing on lists by The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, The Washington Post, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Food52, Glamour, and many other publications.

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 Marvin K. White, MDiv, is currently serving as the Full-time Minister of Celebration at GLIDE Church in San Francisco. He is a graduate of The Pacific School of Religion, where he earned an MDiv. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Our Name Be Witness; Status; and the two Lammy-nominated collections: last rights and nothin’ ugly fly. He was named one of YBCA's"100" in 2019. He is articulating a vision of social, prophetic and creative justice through his work as a poet, artist, teacher, collaborator, preacher, cake baker, and Facebook Statustician.

Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Theatre, Dance, and Performing Studies, the Departments of Anthropology, African American Studies, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. Dr. Williams-Forson is the author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (UNC Press 2022); Taking Food Public: Redefining Food in a Changing World, a co-edited collection w/Carole Counihan, (Routledge 2013); and, the award-winning Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (UNC Press 2006). She is known nationally and internationally for her pioneering work in building the scholarly subfield of Black food studies and has published articles numerous on this aspect of the material lives of African Americans in the United States from the late 19th century to the present.

Jamia Wilson is an award-winning feminist activist, writer, speaker, and podcaster. She joined Random House as vice president and executive editor in 2021. As the former director of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York and the former VP of programs at the Women’s Media Center, Jamia has been a leading voice on women’s rights issues for over a decade. Her work has appeared in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, the Today Show, CNN, Elle, BBC, Rookie, Refinery 29, Glamour, Teen Vogue, and The Washington Post. She is the author of This Book Is Feminist, Young, Gifted, and Black, the introduction and oral history in Together We Rise: Behind the Scenes at the Protest Heard Around the World, Step Into Your Power: 23 Lessons on How to Live Your Best Life, Big Ideas for Young Thinkers, ABC's of AOC, and the co-author of Roadmap for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Advocacy, and Activism for All.

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Thank you to our generous sponsors

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