April 2018’s Harpy Agenda grant – Matthew Teutsch writing on Strange Fruit

By shing, April 25, 2018

Matthew Teutsch’s Black Labor in Waid and Jones’s “Strange Fruit”, published on his personal blog, is our Harpy Agenda April microgrant recipient. It was a nuanced look at a specific part of a flawed book, and integrated and highlighted prior research and criticism of the book by writers of color.

While the Harpy Agenda was intended to be awarded to writers of color, we do review the work first and highlight excellent work when it is excellent – when Teutsch told us that he was not a writer of color, we decided to award him the grant anyway. In addition, this month we decided to give Women Write About Comics the same microgrant amount, intended for a future work by a writer of color, with no editorial role on our part. It was given to Jazmine Joyner, for her investigative reporting, with Rosie Marx, on Universal Fan Con. That article, Universal Fan Con: Peeling Back The Layers, published today,  can be found on their website.

note: J.A. Micheline, a previous Harpy Agenda grant recipient, and currently a co administrator of the grant, was cited in Teutsch’s writing, and opted out of the grant decisions this month, due to that.