Assistant Director
Xochi Quetzali Cartland is a poet, Transformative Justice Practitioner, and amateur pretzel maker. She received her BA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2021, where she graduated with honors and as a Royce Fellow for her research in the field of gender justice. While at Brown she was the co-founder of the Transformative Justice Initiative, a project that seeks to create community infrastructure to minimize, interrupt, and prevent interpersonal violence. In her six years of curriculum development, she has built out a yearlong LGBTQ inclusion curriculum for high schoolers, a nine-month long curriculum to teach youth leaders how to interrupt cycles of harm in their own communities, and multiple training series on non-carceral crisis response. Her work has led her on adventures as wide and varied as being a program coordinator for nonprofits seeking to end systemic inequality, a seamstress for a professional theater company, and a brief but memorable stint as an oyster shucker in Portland, Maine. Most recently, she was selected as a Creative Community Fellow through National Art Strategies, and as a Brooklyn Poets Fellow for her writing and community art practice. Having grown up in Silver Spring, Maryland, Xochi is thrilled to have returned to the DMV, and to be supporting the phenomenal work JMJP/OUDC are doing to bring about an equitable and just world.
