Thirsting for Justice: A Preview of YES!’s Summer Issue
“We all have needs,” writes YES! Ƶ Executive Editor Evette Dionne in the Summer 2023 issue of YES! Magazine. “That’s a baseline characteristic of being human,” she continues. “And yet, we live in a world that shames people, especially those from marginalized communities, for vocalizing their needs and doing whatever’s necessary to meet them.”
Dionne is an award-winning journalist, pop culture critic, and magazine editor who covers culture and politics through the lenses of race, gender, class, and size and is the author of Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul, and Lifting As We Climb. She spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on Rising Up With Sonali about the magazine’s feature stories and op-eds centered around the theme of “Thirst,” from the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, to the abolition of policing and prisons, and more.
The views expressed here and on Rising Up With Sonali do not necessarily reflect the opinion of YES! Ƶ.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Ƶ Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 of the same name.
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