Join us for this embodied and moving conversation with Harrison Guy and Dr. Brianna Suslovic. Our guests teach us how to harness the reconstructive power of the abolitionist movement in order to reimagine a thriving black and queer life. Anchored both in their spirited optimism and capacity to face the brutal realities of injustice, our guests inspire listeners to engage with the yet to be realized possibilities for meaningful action and transformative living.
Episode References
- Kelley, R. D. G. (2003). Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Penguin Books.
- Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
- No New Prisons Illinois
- Sedgwick, E. K. (1997). Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You. In E. K. Sedgwick (Ed.), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings on Fiction (pp. 1–38). Duke University Press.
- Boggs, N. (2025). Baldwin: A Love Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- El-Kurd, M. (2025). Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal. Haymarket Books.
About Our Guests
Harrison Guy (he/him) is a nationally recognized choreographer, cultural architect, and Black LGBTQ community leader whose work lives at the intersection of art, culture, and liberation. For more than two decades, he has used dance, storytelling, and community engagement to preserve Black cultural memory, celebrate queer identity, and create spaces where people can be fully seen and affirmed. He is the founder and artistic director of Urban Souls Dance Company, a Houston-based professional dance company known for centering Black voices and experiences through bold, movement-driven work. A Dance/USA Fellow and Dance Source Houston Artistic Honoree, Guy’s choreography has been presented on stages ranging from Rice University to Carnegie Hall, where his acclaimed work Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness was performed with students from The Ailey School. Beyond the stage, Guy serves as Director of Arts and Culture for the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, leading arts-based strategies that preserve Black heritage and strengthen community in Houston’s State-designated African American Heritage District. He is also the founder of Black Arts Movement Houston, the African American Dance Festival, and the Charles Law Community Archive, which preserves the history and contributions of Houston’s Black LGBTQ community. A trailblazer in civic and cultural leadership, Guy serves as National President of Delta Phi Upsilon Fraternity, Inc., the nation’s first Greek-letter organization for gay men. He is a former Chair of Houston’s Mayor’s LGBTQ Advisory Board and made history as the first Black man named Houston Pride Grand Marshal. At his core, Harrison Guy is a student of the city, using art and culture to remember, empower, and amplify the stories of Black and LGBTQ communities while imagining more just and joyful futures.
Dr. Brianna Suslovic holds a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School. She is an incoming assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare. She is also a 2018 graduate of Smith’s M.S.W. program and received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College. Suslovic studies carcerality, punishment, prisons, jails, courts, and policing. She also organizes with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work. Prior to starting her Ph.D., Suslovic worked in New York City as a mitigation specialist and clinician for a public defender’s office and a forensic mental health clinic. Her Smith internship experiences exposed her to adult inpatient and outpatient psychiatry. She is on the board of the APA’s Division 39 and Section IX, and she continues to teach and consult with psychoanalytic institutes across the country. In her spare time, she teaches in Illinois jails and prisons, facilitates yoga classes in her neighborhood, and teaches social work students at UChicago.
Dr. Carter is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and member of the leadership team of the union of Massachusetts state university professors and librarians. They maintain a private practice in psychoanalysis, individual and couple psychotherapy, and clinical supervision. Their writing can be found in assorted psychoanalytic journals and on their 
After beginning his career representing people accused of crimes who could not afford an attorney, Alec Karakatsanis founded the 
Mary Kim Brewster is an executive editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and the guest editor of the special edition of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 24(40): “On Being Asian in America”. She is a clinical psychologist, faculty member of The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Director of the Serious Mental Illness and the Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. She supervises in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at City University of New York and has a private practice in New York.
Shinhee Han, PhD is a senior psychotherapist at the New School University
David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor in the Programs of Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. Eng is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. In 2021, he was awarded the Kessler Prize from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), which is given to a scholar and/or activist who has produced a body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. His most recent publications are Reparations and the Human (Duke, 2025), and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke, 2019). 
Griffin Hansbury, LCSW-R, is the author of several books, including Feral City (as Jeremiah Moss) and the Stonewall Award-winning novel Some Strange Music Draws Me In. His writing on the city has appeared in many publications, including n+1, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. His clinical writing has received the Ralph Roughton Paper Award and appeared in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, among other journals. He practices as a psychoanalyst in New York City.
Kris Grey is a New York City based transgender artist who uses their body as raw material, often presenting themselves in states of extreme vulnerability as an invitation to experience transcendence or discover hidden queer histories. Grey’s cultural work includes curatorial projects, performance, writing, and studio production. Grey has been a resident artist at the Bronx Museum, Fire Island Artist Residency, ANTI Festival for Contemporary Art, International Centre for Training in the Performing Arts, Wave Hill, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson. Grey’s writing, Trans*feminism: fragmenting and re-reading the history of art through a trans* perspective, was published by Manchester University Press in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Grey earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of and a Masters Degree in Fine Art from Ohio University. They perform, teach, and exhibit work internationally.
Foluke Taylor
Jyoti M. Rao is a psychoanalyst and holds faculty appointments at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis, and The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her publications, which explore the intersection between unconscious process and social phenomena, have appeared in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Parapraxis Magazine, Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and elsewhere. She is in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
George Makari
Francisco J. González is a psychoanalyst who helped found and co-directs the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) in San Francisco which is spearheading a movement to bring community work to psychoanalytic training. He also conducts, teaches, and supervises traditional dyadic psychoanalysis at PINC, and is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. His writing focuses on the articulation of individual and collective psychic life, including in the domains of gender, sexuality, racialized difference, and immigration. He has been the recipient of the Symonds Award, the Ralph E. Roughton Paper Award, and co-recipient of the JAPA Award for the Best Published Paper 2019. He serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, JAPA, and Parapraxis and on the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis. He practices privately in San Francisco and Oakland and in the public domain at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco.