Ashanti Dinah Orozco-Herrera

Ashanti Dinah Orozco-Herrera was born in Barranquilla (Colombian Caribbean). She is an activist and a militant afrofeminist, and a member of the “Angela Davis” Organization of Black Communities in Barranquilla. She holds a BA in Education from the Universidad del Atlántico, and an MA in Hispanic American Literature from the Instituto Caro y Cuervo.  She is a practicing Santera in the Regla de Osha of the Afro-Cuban spritual tradition. A number of her poems published in Poética del Munta Renaciente were published previously in Revista Kumba of the Universidad Nacional, Afroféminas in Spain, Literariedad, Afro-Hispanic Review in the United States, the literary magazine Otro páramo, Nueva Poesía y Narrativa Hispanoamericana del Siglo XXI, Lord Byron Ediciones, Madrid, in the book Más allá del decenio de los pueblos afrodescendientes, and in Investigando el racismo y la discriminación en la escuela, of the “Proyecto Dignificación de las y los afrodescendientes a través de la afroetnoeducación” in Colombia. She won the Premio Benkos Biohó, 2016, in the category of Ethnoeducation, on Colombia’s Día Nacional de la Afrocolombianidad. The award was given to her by the IDPAC, in recognition of her contributions as a teacher in the Universidad Distrital de Bogotá’s Childhood Teaching Program in its implementation of a Chair in Afro-Colombian Studies.