Reverend Janna Nelson was ordained by the First Existentialist Congregation of Atlanta in 1999, where she was an active member for decades before moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be closer to her large family. She is a retired elementary school teacher and preschool director who enjoys children and who learns as much from them as they do from her. She was doing singing with a sister in classrooms in a local school until the pandemic closed schools down in March 2020.
Janna and her husband, Scott Hooker, also play continue to play music together, finding new folks to play with here. She is also enjoying having time to cultivate a regular writing practice.
She is honored to be speaking to the congregation and is grateful to be invited to share reflections through an existential/feminist perspective. She had personal experiences as a young person that stirred ideas about life that she later found expressed by these writers and thinkers. These ideas and concepts continue to be a touchstone for a way to live life more fully, with all its complexity and grief and uncertainty, to participate in freedom from oppression and alienation of all kinds, a way to keep moving forward, to help build something good, to participate in healing.
Kathy McGuire will talk about her experiences studying in a virtual community the past year at the Druid College, and how Druidism fits in with multiple identities as a UU, existentialist, small farmer, and artist.
Originally hailing from San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Katherine McGuire is a lifelong learner with diverse interests, holding degrees in psychology, biomedical sciences, music performance and public administration. She and her family live on a small farm in the woods in Conyers, Georgia, where they enjoy the company of chickens, quail, ducks, rabbits, cats, dogs, and a hooded rat. During the work week, you can find her at Oxford College of Emory University, where she serves as the Director of Institutional Research.
“This is Not Who We Are: Thoughts on Living Up to Who We Are as Humans”
Anthony Knight is the Founder, President & CEO of The Baton Foundation—a Georgia nonprofit organization that serves the emotional, intellectual and cultural needs of Black boys ages 10-17. Before founding the Foundation, Mr. Knight worked for twenty-two years as a museum educator and consultant. Mr. Knight has extensive experience with and interest in African American history and culture, public and living history, informal education and Black youth. Mr. Knight’s work with The Baton Foundation reflects his ongoing interest in the issues and practices related to the collecting, preservation and interpretation of information about and material culture from the African Diaspora. Mr. Knight’s undergraduate work was in Spanish and English (Ohio Wesleyan University), and his graduate work was in museum education (The George Washington University). Mr. Knight also holds a degree in Spanish-to-English translation from the Núcleo de Estudios Lingüísticos y Sociales, Caracas, Venezuela. Mr. Knight is a New York City native.
Born and growing up in seacoast New Hampshire, Dave Bryant Hayward became an activist while a student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. from 1967 -1971.
Desperately coming out to the legendary Frank Kameny, president of the D.C. Mattachine Society, in a May 1969 phone call, Dave learned where the gay bars were in D.C. In the Fall he joined the Mattachine Society at an outdoor reception, and co-founded the Washington, D.C. Gay Liberation Front in January 1970. The GLF celebrated the first anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots at a D.C. intown park in 1970, and also picketed the gay bar The Lost and Found on Capitol Hill for its multiple carding policies of women and people of color.
Dave is thrilled to have campaigned for Dr. Kameny for the House of Representatives in 1971, as the first openly gay man to run for Congress. Also he wrote for the GWU Hatchet newspaper all four years, often covering LGBTQ themes in the arts, and for the DC GLF Newsletter.
Since October 1971 Dave has aided and abetted every Atlanta Pride. One of the core collective producing Atlanta Pride in 1972, the first Pride March in the streets, Dave is honored to be thrown out of two gay bars for promoting Pride.
Dave Hayward, right; Elizabeth Monahan, center, Greg James, left
Initially “the city too busy to hate” spewed backlash for a gay march in the streets, which abated after a successful event, culminating in Georgia’s first openly gay political appointee:
Charlie St. John appointed by Mayor Sam Massell, to Atlanta’s Community Relations Commission in January 1973.
From 1977 to1979 he and his former partner Greg James anchored “Gay Digest” on Radio Free Georgia WRFG FM 90.1, and he and Greg produced Atlanta and Georgia’s first two LGBTQ film festivals in 1979 under the auspices of the newly formed Atlanta Gay and Lesbian Center.
Primarily Dave’s mania for social justice expresses in his writing, and he has published in local, regional, national, and international media, including The Advocate, OUT Magazine, Canada’s LGBTQ magazine Frontiers, and most recently in Georgia Voice, where he reveals our LGBTQ roots, and pens tributes to pathfinders and pioneers and trailblazers.
After founding Touching Up Our Roots in 2002, in 2016 Dave became one of Atlanta Pride’s Grand Marshals. In 2015 he created Our Founding Valentines with Atlanta Pride to recognize community icons, and in 2016 he initiated the LGBTQ Story Tour with Pride and with the LGBT Institute at the Center for Civil and Human Rights. Since 2017 he and Lesbian herstorian Maria Helena Dolan have co-hosted the Story Tour.
Currently with a grant from the Georgia Humanities Council, Emory University professor Eric Solomon and Dave are posting the LGBTQ Story Tour online, for an October launch in conjunction with October Pride and National Coming Out Day October 15th.
That’s All Folks!
Dave Bryant Hayward
Coordinator, Touching Up Our Roots, Inc.: Georgia’s LGBTQ Story Project
“The Archaeology and History of Native Americans in North Georgia: Mississippian Period, Contact, and Post-Contact“
Biography
I am an archaeologist who has worked extensively in the Southeastern United States in both academic and cultural resource management settings. I received my Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Kentucky in 2011, after earning a M.A. degree in anthropology from the University of Georgia and a B.S. degree from Radford University in southwestern Virginia. After receiving my master’s degree, I taught for a year at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and then worked at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville; I also assisted with the University of Georgia excavations of the Mississippian period Lamar Mounds in central Georgia. In 1998 I began a career in cultural resource management, working as a Principal Investigator for The Louis Berger Group and later for Gray & Pape, Inc., in Richmond, Virginia. In 2011 I completed my dissertation on Mississippian frontier chiefdoms, specifically the Carter Robinson site, in southwestern Virginia. This work was supported by a National Geographic Exploration Fund grant. In 2013 I received the C.B. Moore Award for Excellence in Archaeology by a Young Scholar from the Southeastern Archaeological Conference. From 2013-2019 I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi, and Associate Professor from 2019-2021. I served as Co-Director of the UM Curation Project, funded by a National Park Service Save America’s Treasures Grant, to catalog and curate the university’s archaeological collections. I am currently Senior Archaeologist at New South Associates, Inc., in Stone Mountain. I also serve as the President of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, a 900-member organization of archaeologists across the Southeast.
Research
My primary area of research is Mississippian chiefdoms located on the periphery of the Mississippian cultural world. I examine the role of craft production in the emergence of inequality within chiefdoms. I do this through the analysis of ceramic vessels, shell items, (beads, shell debris and lithic tools), and evidence of fabric production. I analyze domestic household economies and specifically women’s roles in these economies through comparisons of domestic structures within and between sites. I expanded excavations to the nearby fifteenth-century Ely Mound in 2019. I also research the Westos, a mid-seventeenth century Northeastern Native American group who initiated Indian slaving in the Southeast, and more generally, the contact period, the focus of a recent co-edited volume.
In service to the discipline I research field safety and ethics. I oversaw creation and implementation of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference Sexual Harassment Survey, served on the Society for American Archaeology Sexual Harassment Survey committee and Ethics Task Force 2, served as a consultant on the National Park Service Sexual Harassment Survey and serve as an advisor on the National Science Foundation grant investigating safer field school practices. Recent publications examine safety issues for archaeologists with chronic health conditions and safe excavation of arsenic-embalmed individuals of the nineteenth-century. I am a co-creator of the crowd-sourced website Re-Centering Southeastern Archaeology bibliography to increase knowledge and citations of publications by archaeologists and scholars that identify as Black, indigenous, LatinX, people of color, women, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities.
Select Publications:
In Review Gender, Crafting and Power. In Mississippian Women, edited by Rachel Briggs, Lynn Sullivan, and Michaelyn Harle. Under review and contract with University Press of Florida.
In Press Before Columbus: History, Archaeology and Resources. In Understanding and Teaching Native American History, edited by Kristofer Ray and Brady DeSanti. Harvey Goldberg Series for Understanding and Teaching History. Under contract with University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
2021 Arsenic and Old Graves: A Method for Testing Arsenic Contamination in Historic Cemeteries. Maureen Meyers, David Breetzke and Henry Holt. Manuscript submitted to Advances in Archaeological Practice special issue, Health and Wellness in Archaeology.
2021 Mitigation Strategies for Asthma, Diabetes, and Depression During Field Archaeology. Carla Klehm, Maureen Meyers, and Rebecca Peixotto. Manuscript submitted to Advances in Archaeological Practice special issue, Health and Wellness in Archaeology.
2021 Salt, Craft Specialization, and Exchange During the 14th Century in Virginia. In TheArchaeology of Salt in Eastern North America, edited by Paul Eubanks and Ashley Dumas. University of Alabama Press.
2020 Contact, Colonization and Native Commerce in the Southeastern United States, edited by Tony Boudreaux, Maureen Meyers, and Jay Johnson, pp. 192-203. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
2018 The Concept and Consequences of Sexual Harassment in Southeastern Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Practice 6(4): 1-13. Maureen Meyers, Elizabeth Horton, Tony Boudreaux, Stephen Carmody, Alice Wright and Victoria Dekle. *Cambridge Press ‘Article of the Month’ November 2018.
2017 Social Integration at a Frontier and the Creation of Mississippian Social Identity in Southwestern Virginia. Southeastern Archaeology 36(2): 1-10.
2016 Political Economy and Craft Production before and after the Collapse of Mississippian Chiefdoms. In Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Reorganization, edited by Ronald Faulseit, pp. 380-403. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.
2015 MultiscalarArchaeological Perspectives of the Southern Appalachians,edited by Ramie Gougeon and Maureen Meyers. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.
2014 Shell Trade: Craft Production at a Fourteenth-Century Mississippian Frontier. In Trend and Tradition in Southeastern Zooarchaeology, edited by Tanya Peres, pp. 80-104. University of Florida Press, Gainesville.
Our Fellowship Minister, Rev. Marsha Mitchiner, has served the Congregation for over two decades, since ordination by us, following her study with Lanier Clance.
She counsels, connects, and contacts members and friends, and for those who need it, performs the laying-on of hands in her role as a massage therapist.
Many of us can vouch for the quality of her work, and appreciate the wisdom, restraint, and compassion she brings to the job of caring for our Congregation. Marsha speaks once each quarter, and helps smooth the functioning of the Congregation innumerable times in between.
Franklin Abbott has been a practicing psychotherapist in Atlanta for nearly forty years. He is also a poet, musician, community organizer and amateur oral historian. His connection to the Congregation and Old Stone Church goes back more than forty years to early urban radical faery gatherings held in the sanctuary before First E became its steward. He has spoken at First E many times, performed music and poetry there, coordinated events and memorials. He and First E founding minister Lanier Clance were close friends and co-hosted an eclectic existential radio program on WRFG for over five years in the mid-1980s. His most recent project is a double CD of 44 original poems and 14 original songs titled Don’t Go Back To Sleep. He lives near Decatur with two cats who assisted him with mental health and amusement during the bad times of Covid before vaccinations.
Rev. Marti Keller has served as a Unitarian Universalist minister for more than 23 years, most recently as the co-transition minister for the UU Church of Jacksonville Florida and prior to that in Auburn Alabama. She has been both a parish and social justice minister, and a guest speaker in many pulpits, including internationally in Edinburgh, Scotland, Ireland and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She is spending more time researching, reflecting on and writing personal essays and immersion journalism piece, having spent the first 20 years of her professional life as a reporter and editor (graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism).
Stell Simonton first stepped into the door of the First Existentialist Congregation after moving to Atlanta in the mid-1980s. She’s been a member for many years.
Since 2013, she’s worked as a freelance journalist in Atlanta, writing frequently about youth development and the various nonprofits that help young people thrive. Her work has appeared in Youth Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, Georgia Health News and other publications. She previously worked for 19 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Bill Moyers once wrote something to the effect that a journalist enjoys the license to be educated in public — that journalism is really a continuing education course. It’s a free pass to ask questions.
To Stell, the process of questioning can involve a delightful skepticism (sometimes an adolescent in-your-face approach) but it also encourages a reflectiveness that can come from walking in someone else’s shoes. Since she is turning 65 this year, she’s reflecting on old age, particularly what Carl Jung has to say about the second half of life. Hence the topic of the Sept. 5 presentation: “Getting Wiser with Age?”
Stell lives with her husband, Wade Marbaugh, in Atlanta. Their two daughters, Anna Simonton and Olivia Simonton, were raised in the First Existentialist Congregation.
Our Fellowship Minister, Rev. Marsha Mitchiner, has served the Congregation for over two decades, since ordination by us, following her study with Lanier Clance.
She counsels, connects, and contacts members and friends, and for those who need it, performs the laying-on of hands in her role as a massage therapist.
Many of us can vouch for the quality of her work, and appreciate the wisdom, restraint, and compassion she brings to the job of caring for our Congregation. Marsha speaks once each quarter, and helps smooth the functioning of the Congregation innumerable times in between.
