Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia is the cofounder (with her late mama, Dee) of POOR Magazine, a grassroots arts and media-justice organization in San Francisco. Tiny and Dee were houseless for much of Tiny’s childhood, evading various systems that threatened to institutionalize, exploit, and incarcerate them. They survived and fought back by remaining fiercely dedicated to each other, creating independent microbusinesses to make ends meet, becoming underground avant-garde art celebrities, and creating POOR Magazine to make silenced voices of poor and indigenous people heard through media and art. Tiny tells their story in her 2006 memoir, Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America (City Lights). Continue reading “Community Reparations Now! Tyrone Boucher and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia Talk Revolutionary Giving, Class, Privilege, and More”
Teaching Poverty Law
This semester I’m teaching Poverty Law at Seattle U. Law. It has been a fun and challenging task to put together a syllabus and decide what should be included in a class covering such a broad topic. So much of what is taught in law school I would consider rich people’s law and so much of what poverty lawyers do in the day-to-day is not covered in law school courses or tested on the bar exam. Trying to create a class that might address all the enormous constant legal issues faced by poor people (eviction, criminalization, child welfare, public assistance, old age benefits, immigration, low-wage work, Medicaid, consumer rights, credit, gentrification, etc.) and all the ways that the law structures our economic relations to create poverty is daunting. Continue reading “Teaching Poverty Law”