Privacy Policy

Mission Statement:

Black, woman; we have been lumped and despite the attempt to generalize, these seeming understatements of identity have so many possibilities. The labels, black and woman independently have numerous dimensions; their coupling has linked so many, combining descendants of powerful nations that may have otherwise ended up at each other's throats. The capacity of these two labels to unite generates a power that so often goes untapped.

Whether it is a self-help book or the latest addition to magazine publishing there seems to always be someone willing to explain to each generation of women how to behave. The rules of earlier centuries encouraged impeccable manners and appearance. Then the liberation movement encouraged women to take their place as human beings but recently it seems it has all been reduced to lessons in mediocrity.

Based in New York, The Coup magazine is two tiered; working through the web and with a hard-copy quarterly publication. Sophisticated yet simple we cover an expansive audience while maintaining a finely tuned ear to what's really important in the world of black women. The Coup reader not only wants to be informed about what's going on in the world but also wants to be connected to the reflections of her sisters.

Wayetu Moore - Editor In Chief

Advisers

Asha Bandele

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Yanick Rice-Lamb

Mwansa Mandela

Editorial Department

Brittany Gail Thomas - Health/Nutrition Editor

B. Yvette Minix - Education Editor

Wendi Muse - Editor-At-Large

Nana-Adwoa Ofori - Lifestyle/Entertainment Editor

Jessica McCurdy Crooks - Carribean Region Editor

Analyn Revilla - Business/Technology Editor

Gynelle Findlay - Politics Editor

America Martin - Director of Bilingual Content

Angel Noel Carvalho - Spanish Language Editor

Praveen Sequeira - Mumbai Correspondent

Adisa Vera Beatty - Blogger/Guest Blogger

Tremaya Bradley Reynolds - Blogger/Guest Blogger

Creative Department

Josette Youssef - Photo Editor

Chanel Kennebrew - Design Consultant

Anastasia Aizman - Contributing Designer

Derval Fairweather - Contributing Designer

Daniel O'Brien - Lead Illustrator

BIOGRAPHIES

Wayetu Moore

Editor-In-Chief

"The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.” - Ida B. Wells

First, it is important that we release ourselves of the social obligation of partiality towards one another; an obligation that spurs an over-zealous and impossible goal of total unification, and a task that only takes away from the authenticity of our relationships. Our obligation is to humanity. We are human beings first. Next, we are women. And then, we are women of color. Although the precedent is where Ashleigh and I chose to stop, the hierarchy of social obligation, or whatever it is that you wish to call it goes on and on. That is the point. We chose the fact that we are women of color as a starting point for conversation, anecdote, and commentary. We want to show that our layers are countless, our backgrounds are diverse, and our possibilities are infinite. We want to immortalize our stories through the written word, and most importantly, through the progress of our minds.

The first definition of the word coup in Webster's dictionary is: a brilliant sudden action or plan. Simply put, our “coup” is to share the lives and struggles of our peers while promoting intellectual thought and (ideally,) unification within our own community(s). We quote the genius of Mandela and Selassie, hear the echoes of Ellison and Dunbar, and breathe the legacies of King and X. But seldom do we celebrate and learn the lives of black women around the world for reasons other than political correctness and the avoidance of subversion. Because we lack the knowledge of the capable intellectual, spiritual, and politically influential black women of the past and present, there is an absence of pride within black women; an absence that leads to a very common and devastating self-hatred. This hatred, one that has existed among us for centuries, subsequently fuels criticism with the intent to offend, prejudice, fear, ignorance, resentment, suspicion, scorn, aggression, violence, and finally disassociation. It is only therefore, in knowing one another, in knowing ourselves, that we can make a significant step towards improving the state of people of color around the world.

“The people must know before they can act”. And we are our only hope. It is time to take the world off of Atlas' back. Our coup is to face each other and march. It is time to speak. Time to tell. Let's go.

Ashleigh Rae Staton

Creative Director

coup: n. pl. coups (kz) : A brilliantly executed stratagem; a triumph.

I love this project already. Yes, it is a project for me, not simply a business venture, The Coup is meant to be a forum. It is an extension of my interests and concerns, and I hope it becomes that for you too. It’s an attempt to put something into the world that I think is needed, to encourage discourse and promote understanding.

You probably won’t agree with everything you read here. I probably won’t either and that, to me, is exactly the point. There are so many questions, like: what are the correlations between culture and socio-political commitment? What are the politics of representation?

The Coup is meant to be a bridge between nations, between states, between consciences. So use it for the tool it is; write an essay on your understanding or misunderstanding of a current political situation, write about your thoughts on culture or just write us a letter about your day. All I ask, is that you remain aware of he correlations between the large and the small, between the events of your day and the events in the lives of your sisters around the world.

It is often the disenfranchised that lead the masses in the spirit of revolution. Whether that revolution is social, combative or artistic, it is the work of those who have been continually left out of the consideration of the mainstream who are able to focus on the right criticisms. I know we have a lot to say.

There’s strength in our numbers. There’s a strength in out shared history and there is even more strength to be found in our experiences once again being joined. So, let’s reclaim our voices, each other and ourselves.

We are bringing love in our strength; a love mixed with the fire that results when one tires of waiting. We are no longer asking permission and this will be our coup.

Wendi Muse
Editor-at-Large

Wendi Muse is originally from Memphis, Tennessee, but came to New York to attend NYU. While an undergrad, she was a member of the MLK Scholars and attended the Gallatin School, where she created a concentration entitled "legal and cultural studies of oppressed and marginalized peoples" with a special focus on inter-ethnic/racial interaction and coalition building. Though she presently works at a law firm by day and interns for an independent fashion designer, she plans to attend graduate school for Brazilian Studies and Portuguese and pursue a career in teaching and research.

Nana-Adwoa Ofori

Lifestyle/Entertainment Editor

Imagination, design, and artistic expression have been a consistent part of Nana-Adwoa Ofori, whose parents both pursued the arts in their native homeland of Ghana West Africa. In 2002 she graduated with honors from Smith College. In 2004, she enrolled Parsons School of Design in 2004 and majored in Fashion Design. In addition to a fashion degree from Parsons, she went on to design women's wear for Polo Ralph Lauren from 2003-2005. In 2005 she left PRL to branch out her design experience to work with some of the best companies in NYC. BANANA REPUBLIC, GAP, TOMMY HILFIGER, ENYCE, and Kati Stern for VENEXIANA are just a few of the design companies that have contracted her skills and resources on various projects ranging from conception to production. In 2006 Nana-Adwoa branched out of fashion to embrace her written communication skills and joined the freelance team at the NY POST. In addition to the NY POST, she continues to write for NYC publications Courier Life, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Coup Magazine. She resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Jessica McCurdy Crooks

Caribbean Region Editor

Analyn Revilla

Business/Technology Editor

Gynelle Findlay

Politics Editor

Praveen Sequeira

Mumbai Correspondent

Praveen Sequeira was born in India and has completed undergraduate studies at St. Xaviers College, Mumbai, India; and has an MBA in Hospitality and Tourism from the Institute Cezar Ritz, Switzerland.

America Martin

Director of Bilingual Content

America Martin graduated from the University of California, San Diego, in 2001 with a Bachelor’s Degree in World Literature. Subsequently, she was accepted to Graduate School at the University of Notre Dame to pursue a Master’s Degree in Spanish Literature and Linguistics. Ms. Martin spent her childhood in south Mexico, where she became fascinated by the rich oral tradition of this country’s indigenous tribes and even had the opportunity to dwell amongst the natives for a period of time. Her work has been published in Foto Zoom magazine in Mexico, Firstdraft magazine and the Acorn Review in the United States, and Warsaw Insider magazine in Poland. She is an expat in Poland, where she is writing her fourth novel.

Angel Noel Carvalho

Spanish Language Editor

Adisa Vera Beatty

Blogger/Guest Blogger

Tremaya Bradley-Reynolds

Blogger/Guest Blogger

Josette Youssef

Photo Editor

Anastasia Aizman

Graphic Design Intern

Asha Bandele

Advisor

Asha Bandele began her work as an organizer while attending Hunter College. THere, she fought to maintain a policy of open admissions and joined the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, primarily working to raise awareness about political prisoners in the United States. As her work as an

organizer evolved, Ms. bandele decided that she could make her greatest contribuiton to the fight for human rights through her writing. She has since published three books: Absence in the Palms of My Hands (Harlem River Press, 1996), a collection of poems that speaks to social, political, and personal injustices; The Prisoner's Wife (Scribner, 1999) an award-winning memoir about her marriage to an incarcerated man; and Daughter (Scribner,2003), a novel about the impact of police brutality on one family. From 2000-2004, she served as Features Editor and as a writer for Essence Magazine, where she edited numerous pieces on the criminal justice system and interviewed a rane of people including Kofi Annan, Kadiatou Diallo, Harry Belafonte and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Ms. Bandele holds a B.A. from the New School for Social Research and an M.F.A. from Bennington College. Born in the Bronx, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughter. During her Revson year, she completed another volume of poems, The Subtle Art of Breathing (Moore Black Press, 2005) and made a career shift, accepting the position as Deputy Director of Policy for the Drug Policy Alliance.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Advisor

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer, black, domesticated graffiti artist, not-so-coincidentally working on a PhD in Gender in the African Diaspora in the English Department at Duke University. She has been using words and color to interrupt landscapes of oppression since age 14. Her metaphorical bombings include a wide set of art exhibits, live performances, t-shirt designs, coloring books, games, youth activism workbooks, workshops and volumes of poetry published, fashioned and curated through her not-for-profit creationspace brokenbeautifulpress. Her most important exhibitions are collaborative and take place through countless youth programs, workshops, and conference presentations. Alexis’s ultimate goal is to write on the souls of her people while provoking them to write all over her future. As a high school student she served on the editorial board of Atlanta, Georgia’s VOX Teen Newspaper, a publication by and for teens, that reached 80,000 readers. As a college student Alexis organized fellow students as a staff-person at the Rape Crisis Anti-Violence Support Center, chair of the United Student of Color Council, Vice President of the Black Organization of Soul Sisters and co-coordinator of a student-run office that she helped design called the Social Justice Empowerment Initiative. For the past eight years Alexis has been facilitating youth leadership trainings all over the world for young people (ages 7-25) of African descent through the International Black Youth Summit, and now serves as General Coordinator of the Summit. On the national level, Alexis serves on the Advocates for Youth, National Young Women of Color Leadership Council, a body convened to respond to the disparate rates of HIV/AIDS among young women of color in the United States. Locally, in Durham, North Carolina she coordinates a vision based creative arts program for gang-involved young people who have been long-term suspended from the Durham Public School system called “Vision in Action” and a public arts program for queer, questioning and allied teens of color called BAM! She is also on a team convened by SpiritHouse, a local community organization, to design an intergenerational intervention into the outrageous rates of HIV among black women in our city. Tag. That’s it.

Feel free to tag Alexis back at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Yanick Rice-Lamb

Advisor

Yanick Rice-Lamb is currently teaching courses in newspaper journalism, magazine publishing and new media at Howard University. Her research interests include African-Amerian issues and readership patterns. Ms. Rice-Lamb was previously editor-in-chief of Heart & Soul and BET Weekend magazines and has also worked at The New York Times, The Atlanta Constitution, The Toledo Blade, Child and Essence.

Mwansa Mandela

Advisor

After graduating from University of Kansas in 1982 with a Master's degree in Health Education and Counseling, Mwansa Mandela worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, The University of Utah-Salt Lake, Utah State University-Logan, and the University of Kansas-Lawrence. Mandela also taught Psychology and Theater at the University of Asmara in Ethiopia, during a time when the country was a war zone. She then counseled women and children of war, and became active in community and anti-war activism. She currently belongs to an organization called SisterNet, that for the past 10 years has provided health conference, seminars and workshops for black women and their families living in Champaign-Urbana and/or surrounding communities (Rantoul, St.Joseph, Monticello, Chicago, etc). The program focuses on the educational, psychological, economic, political, spiritual and physical health of Black people in general, and black women and their families in particular.

Robtel Neajai Pailey

Advisor

After traveling throughout Africa and studying abroad in Egypt, Ghana, Italy, South Africa, and Switzerland, Robtel Neajai Pailey remains passionate about activism and writing as forms of personal and social transformation. A published writer and activist, she has appeared in Africa Today, Red Pepper Magazine, Pambazuka News, The Washington Informer Newspaper, Clamor Magazine, Port of Harlem Magazine, allafrica.com, Global Woman Magazine, The Liberian Analyst, Black Star News, Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings, Mano Vision Magazine, and the July 2007 publication of From the Slave Trade to’ Free’ Trade: How Trade Undermines Justice and Democracy in Africa. Pailey is a native of Monrovia, Liberia and holds a Masters degree in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and undergraduate degrees in African Studies/English Literature from Howard University.