About Abe Louise
Bio
Abe Louise Young is a writer and social practice artist focused on liberatory encounters, civil rights and documenting human voices.
She also coaches women writers and provides editorial services in memoir, nonfiction, poetry and the academic humanities.
Her work has been published in Poetry, The Nation, Witness, Narrative Magazine, The Abbey, Texas Monthly, Massachusetts Review, New Letters and elsewhere.
Her books include a queer poetry chapbook Heaven to Me (2018); a vegan cookbook, Magical Foods & the Mason Jar Life (2023); and numerous anthologies, including Queer Youth Advice for Educators (2011) and Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays and Vision from American Teenagers (2005).
For many years, she has organized and led volunteer writing, oral history and mutual aid efforts responding to disasters, including Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey. She helped to create Jailhouse Stories: Voices of Pretrial Detention, a digital archive of stories and testimony of human rights abuses in Texas jails. She served for a decade in the movements to end domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse.
In 2024-25, she has been fundraising for food aid for Palestinians in Gaza, writing about awakening to reality as a Jewish American, documenting mutual aid at homeless camps in the American South and spending time at work on a memoir.
Please feel free to reach out if you would like to connect or collaborate.
Personal Story
I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and grew up listening to people speak to strangers with love and abandon, pleasure and pain.
I also grew up listening to intolerable inequities in power, wealth and freedom. At 12, I joined a group called ERACISM that met at the public library and got my first taste of mutual aid and creative, neighbor-to-neighbor activism for cultural change. It was an interracial, cross-class group of people from 12 to 78, figuring out how to resist racism. I was hooked.
Very young, I was aware that I was different—queer, lesbian, backward. To be openly gay was to risk your skull in that era. This led to me wanting to find all the old lesbians and gays I could and listen to them talk and laugh.
My childhood home had equal measures of love and violence, nurture and abuse. I got solace by sitting in Charlene’s, a French Quarter lesbian bar after school, drinking orange juice and doing homework. I ran away from home at age fourteen. After some time living on the street and with various men, I was invited to live at the New Orleans Zen Center, an urban monastery. I stayed there as a resident meditation student while I finished high school.
