Tawana Petty is a mother, award winning activist, social justice organizer, poet and author. She is the past recipient of the Spirit of Detroit Award, Woman of Substance Award, Women Creating Caring Communities Award, and was recognized as one of Who's Who in Black Detroit in 2013.
Tawana is committed to social justice and youth advocacy, and is heavily engaged in transformative work on the ground in Detroit. She is a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership www.boggscenter.org and a member of Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management www.d-rem.org, We the People of Detroit www.wethepeopleofdetroit.com and the People's Water Board Coalition www.peopleswaterboard.org.
In addition to Tawana's social justice work, she has performed across the globe. She has been featured on NPR/WDET, AM 1440, FM 107.5, on former Detroit Councilwoman JoAnn Watson's television program Wake Up Detroit, on the Motown Writers Network, and on former Rolling Stone Editor Dave Marsh's national radio program Living in the Land of Hopes and Dreams. Her work and writings have also been featured in the Huffington Post, the Michigan Citizen, on Shetroit.com, on truth-out.org and in Red Pepper Magazine (UK). She has been a featured speaker and performer at several colleges, universities, secondary schools and prestigious events.
As an organizer, she led the social justice initiatives Detroit 2012, Detroit 2013 and the New Work New Culture Conference, which brought thousands of people collectively to Detroit to engage in visionary organizing and healing work. She was also co-organizer of the People's Forum II: State of Emergency, which mobilized an intergenerational dialogue among Detroiters around emergency management. She has also been actively engaged in the water struggle in Detroit and was invited to speak at the United Nations in New York in 2014 as a representative for Detroit. As a member of The Foundation, which celebrates women in hip hop, she utilizes her creativity and activism to resist misogyny and sexism in music, media and other forms of propaganda by reshaping the narrative.
Tawana, also known as Honeycomb on stage, is the author of Introducing Honeycomb www.amazon.com/author/tawanapetty and is currently working on her second book.
