UUANI welcomes Atena O. Danner as our Action Strategy Director. Atena will work directly with statewide teams in the areas of Legislative Advocacy, Voter Engagement and Resistance. She is a cultural worker who imagines Black liberation, engaged in boundless curiosity. As a poet, singer, and visual artist, Atena’s work encompasses kitchen-table specificity and folk story relatability, covering topics including neurodiversity, human connection, and collective liberation. Atena is also a facilitator, a speaker and occasional worship designer/sermon giver in UU communities around the United States. As an organizer and activist, she has worked to incorporate struggles for justice into her life as a caregiver in a family of complex needs while also writing and publishing in journals, anthologies, and her own book of poetry: Incantations for Rest: Poems, Mediations & Other Magic, Skinner House Books' InSpirit 2021 volume. She is a Roots. Wounds. Words. fellow, an Anaphora Writers Residency fellow, an alum of the Hurston/Wright Writers Week and of Immersion Writers Africa. In their home north of Chicago, near the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires and of the Peoria, Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations, Atena lives with her partner, pets and two free Black children. Her poetry collection, ‘Incantations for Rest’ was the InSpirit book for 2021 and was awarded a Nautilus Silver Award for poetry in 2023.