A talk with Fariha Róisín

As the earliest days of the pandemic approached, our friends at Likeminds were planning a weekend of ideas, activities and festivities in the hills outside Los Angeles. They had gathered a group of artists and visionaries to speak on the topic of movement: Dance, migration, political and cultural movements, and the movements of our own bodies were all on the docket.

This November, we present a series of three speakers from the Likeminds lineup who were unable to present their ideas when the weekend was cancelled due to Covid.

Our first speaker is Fariha Róisín, an Australian-Canadian writer, editor and multi-disciplinary artist.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Vice, Village Voice and others. Previously, she has co-written a self-care column for The Hairpin, an astrology column for them and was the writer-at-large and culture editor for The Juggernaut. From 2012 to 2016 she co-hosted the podcast Two Brown Girls.

She is the founder of Studio Ānanda, a space of cultivation and archive for radical, anti-colonial wellness. She writes a weekly newsletter here and is also the Deputy Editor of Violet Book. Currently, she also sits on the Board of Directors at Find Center.

She has published How To Cure A Ghost (Abrams, 2019), Being In Your Body (Abrams, 2019) and Like A Bird (Unnamed Press, 2020) which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR, Globe and Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, a must-read by Buzzfeed News and received a starred review by the Library Journal. Upon the book’s release, she was also profiled in The New York Times. Her first work of non-fiction is forthcoming and entitled Who Is Wellness For? On Radical Wellness (HarperWave, Spring 2022).