Short Bio
E Morales-Williams, Ph.D. (they/she), is an author, educator, artist, and land steward. For over 20 years they have developed creative healing-based social justice curriculum for youth and adults, creating courses, programming, and trainings for grassroots organizations, community centers, high schools, and colleges/universities.
Long Bio
Originally from East Harlem and the Bronx, NY, E Morales-Williams has been based in Philadelphia for 17 years. They have a Masters and Ph.D. in Urban Education and credit their ancestors and the global Black freedom movement as their true training grounds. They are also a dancer formerly trained at Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club, and subsequent training in dance improv, house, and Dunham technique.
Dr. E taught at the College of Education at Temple University for six years, earning a Excellence in Teaching Award in 2010, while completing their doctoral degree. Their dissertation focused on Black and Latinx youth workers epistemologies of dismantling rape culture in youth settings, and won the Myra Sadker Foundation Dissertation Award in 2012.
For the past decade they have grounded their praxis in the field of non-profits and grassroots formations, gaining wide knowledge, networks, and practice in the movements for survivor justice and abolition, education and prison justice, food and land sovereignty, transformative justice, and Black Palestinian solidarity.
After teaching Social Studies in the Philadelphia School District for three years at an alternative high school, they also served as their first Director of Culture and Climate and co-founded Educators for Consent Culture in 2019. ECC is a grassroots collective of educators in and out of the school district seeking to dismantle rape culture in Philadelphia schools through consent education and advocacy. In their role as the program coordinator for me too. international, they created and facilitated curriculum for their Survivor Leadership Training cohorts and HBCU internship program.
They are a founding member of Black Youth Project (BYP) 100 in 2014, where they were active for three years and co-founded the Healing and Safety Council, which co-wrote the first of a three volume series entitled, “Stay Woke, Stay Whole: A Healing Manual.”
They are also the founding director of TUFF Girls, an intergenerational organizing collective based in North Philly from 2014-2020 which organized vigils for the #SayHerName Campaign, freedom parties for community education, and joined the student-led walkout in 2017 organized by Philadelphia Student Union and Youth United for Change. Their first book, “Turn Up for Freedom: Notes for All the Tough Girls Awakening to Their Collective Power,” archives the stories, tools, and lessons learned at TUFF Girls for middle school and HS readers. “Turn Up for Freedom” was published by Common Notions in 2023.
They have led trainings and retreats for students, teachers, youth workers and executive leadership in high schools, community centers, universities, local and national community organizations, and grassroots collectives. Topics have spanned the gamut and included: healing and leadership development, intergenerational organizing, skill building for consent culture, trauma-informed and healing centered practices for youth and organizational settings, and restorative processes for harm through abolitionist lens.
