What is Starlight and Strategy?

It is a newsletter and a conversation. It is shaped and changed by you. It is inspired by the brilliance and wisdom of Black, Indigenous, and other women and femmes of color.

It is the glimmer that you catch out of the corner of your eye when you look up at the night sky.

It was, even before the pandemic, a dance party in the kitchen. It’s even more so now.

Through this project, I seek to reflect and build on how I see our collective imaginations rooting into the fertile ground of outrage and grief, sprouting into acts of hope, and blooming into many possible futures.

It is a place for us as a community to engage with decolonizing, anti-racist, radically queer, and feminist perspectives and ideas. At the same time, it is a place to make mistakes and learn from them.

OK, this all sounds lovely but what is it, concretely?

Virgos and Queen of Pentacles types, I see you. Starlight and Strategy is a monthly newsletter that will arrive in your inbox on or around the full moon. Each edition includes an essay, writing and tarot prompts, and recommendations of podcasts, articles, and books that seek to change and shape our society toward justice and liberation. Sometimes, I send something a short audio or video clip or other tidbits or around the new moon.

What’s up with subscriptions?

When you subscribe to Starlight and Strategy, you’ll get every new edition directly in your inbox. You’ll also have full access to the website.

You can subscribe for free. Or, if you’d like, you can support this newsletter through a paying subscription. There are three options: $5 a month, $50 a year, or any amount above $50.

If you pay any amount, you will subsidize my monthly donation to Families for Justice and Healing, a grassroots abolition organization working to end the incarceration of women and girls in Massachusetts. When there are enough new paid subscriptions, I will either give a new one-time donation, increase my monthly donation level, or donate to another organization.

There is no difference of content—subscribers of all levels, including the free one, get the same content. This is my personal attempt at navigating and trying to subvert capitalism.

Who are you?

I am the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Last Days, from Alice James Books. My other books and chapbooks are We Come Elemental (Alice James Books), Dovetail (co-authored with Kimiko Hahn, Slapering Hol Press) and bough breaks (Meritage Press). My poetry and articles have been published widely, including by Denver Quarterly, Idaho Review (forthcoming), Dusie, Black Warrior Review, Georgia Review, Lit Hub, and the Rumpus.

I am a queer, mixed race (Japanese and white), cisgender woman and femme, living in on land traditionally cared for by Neponset Band of the Massachusett people. A social justice communications writer and strategist, I spend my days writing truth to power. More about me and my work at tamikobeyer.com.