Team
Rae and baby goats
Rae Garringer
(they/them)
Founder & Director
Rae Garringer is a writer, oral historian, audio producer, and goat farmer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on traditional S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and Šaawanwaki (Shawnee) lands.
When Rae founded Country Queers in 2013, they had no formal training in media production or oral history. They learned a lot through trying things and making mistakes along the way. Rae is a senior Civic Media Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and a member of the National Council of Elders collaborative oral history and podcast team.
Rae is white, queer, nonbinary, and a hermit introvert who is resolutely committed to rural people and places, most especially the central Appalachian region.
A luddite techie at heart, she schemes and daydreams about liberation and movement driven communications to build lasting connections between communities and to strategically dismantle systems of domination.
She currently works on narrative power building as the Executive Director of ReFrame after a decade of organizing and communications brujería. Hermelinda returned to the rolling blue hills of Virginia in 2012 where she writes, cooks, and kicks it with her dogs, kid, chickens, and chosen familia. She believes in the magic, alchemy, strategy, and revolutionary possibilities of small towns and rural people.
hermelinda cortés
(she/they)
Advisory Team Member
hermelinda cortés is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant father and a white factory-workinʼ mama. Raised in the country amidst the Southern delicacies of potato salad and mole, she is a working class Xicana Queer Feminist mama from the heart of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
Hermelinda and her dogs Luna and Valiente
Sharon P. Holland
(she/her)
Advisory Team Member
Sharon P. Holland is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she teaches feminist, queer, and critical race theory. She is a graduate of Princeton University and holds a PhD in English and African American Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, RAISING THE DEAD: READINGS OF DEATH AND (BLACK) SUBJECTIVITY, The Erotic Life of Racism, and the co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism Crossing Waters / Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country.
Sharon and her horse Annie
Sharon is also a horse riding, gardening, big-truck driving country queer who shared her story with this project in June 2017! Sharon lives in unincorporated Chapel Hill, on an African-descended road (former name was "Old Colored Road"), held by the descendants of the enslaved for generations. She lives on Occaneechi, Shakori, Eno, and Sissipahaw peoples' land.
Lewis Raven Wallace
(he/they/ze)
Advisory Team Member
Lewis Raven Wallace is an independent journalist. Ze is the author and creator of The View from Somewhere, a book and podcast about the history of journalistic "objectivity" and how it has been used to uphold the status quo and exclude voices from oppressed communities. He is an Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization and a co-founder of Press On, a southern journalism collective that supports journalism in service of liberation. Lewis focuses on the voices of people who are geographically, economically and politically marginalized, and loves stories about water, place and collective action.
Lewis and Dogwood the pig
Lewis is white and transgender and lives nearby to the lands of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, on territory that once also belonged to the Eno tribe, in Durham, NC.