Rasheedah Phillips
Rasheedah Phillips is a lawyer and an active member of the Afrofuturist community in Philadelphia. A double graduate of Temple University, she first graduated Summa Cum Laude with a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice in 2005. She went on to graduate from the Temple University Beasley School of Law in 2008.[1] She currently serves as Managing Attorney of the LT Housing Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, and has worked at Community Law Services since 2008.[2] In 2013 she was awarded a Next Generation of Women Leaders: Rising Stars by the Philadelphia city council.[1] She has drawn attention for graduating with distinction while raising her daughter, and her story was featured in publications such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Temple Times, and It Couldn't Happen to Me: Three True Stories of Teenage Moms written by Beth Johnson.[3]
She has been involved with the community by volunteering throughout Philadelphia, including speaking engagements about how she succeeded despite the challenges she experienced as a young mother. She has served on the board of several non-profits such as the Family Planning Council, Family Care Solutions, ChildSpace CDI, and Friends of the Free Library.[3]
As Creative Director, she founded the North Philadelphia-based The AfroFuturist Affair' grassroots organization in 2011,[2] self-described as an "organization dedicated to celebrating and promoting Afrofuturistic culture, art, and literature through creative events and creative writing".[3] She is also a founding member of the Metropolarity Speculative Fiction Collective, which is a Philadelphia "corner store sci-fi & action collective" that "wield[s] “science fiction” voice and word to manifest world-paradigms necessary for our survival. Empire does not welcome this. Ride with us against empire".[4]
She published her first novel Recurrence Plot and Other Time Travel Tales in 2014.[5]