Born Donald Weems, Kuwasi Balagoon forged himself in the crucible of rebellion. A veteran of the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army, Balagoon’s life traced the fault lines of 1970s America, state violence, political imprisonment, and the unfinished work of liberation. He survived the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility, endured years in solitary confinement, and wrote fiercely about autonomy, queerness, and revolutionary love.

Balagoon rejected binaries: nationalist and anarchist, soldier and poet, gay man within movements that often erased queerness. His essays and letters reveal a thinker wrestling with strategy and selfhood, insisting that freedom must include the fullness of identity as a bisexual black man and revolutionary.

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