Speak Wild collaborates to amplify advocacy and resources, mental health, and wellness by and for targeted communities, through creative storytelling. Speak Wild is founded by poet, author, performer, and filmmaker Anna Goodman Herrick:

I founded Speak Wild to bring together decades of projects under one roof, so they can all work cohesively and amplify impact .

Advocacy and Impact
Speak Wild came out of years in creative advocacy and impact, from celebrating trans love on VH1 to exploring healing from childhood wounds for the Oprah Winfrey Network and reshaping fashion as an instrument for social cause on Lifetime.

I’ve been grateful to be apply what I’d learned as a producer, director, and head writer for major productions while reaching large audiences creatively, to collaborate with nonprofits and mutual aid, amplifying advocacy and support. Our past projects, such as The Bahebak Project, born during the Muslim Ban, combined artistic advocacy and compassionate communication to support refugee resettlement and advocate for a just peace. As this movement grew, we connected financially resourced people with families they welcomed and contributed to via mutual aid. This collaborative effort, featured at the Teen Vogue Conference, supported sustainable peace-building across borders in the Middle East and provided direct funds, housing, food, and medical care to Syrian refugee families. In response to the pandemic, when we heard from the unhoused communities about a lack of places to wash and access necessities, During the Covid-19 pandemic, The Bahebak Project adapted and expanded mission and reach for emergency aid, joining together with mutual aid group Kindness Grocery Co-Op, the Skid Row unhoused community in Los Angeles, and artist collectives. Together, we created advocacy and distributed mutual aid and essentials, sponsored by Dr. Bronner’s personal care products and local food distribution organizations.

Healing Spaces that Change the Narrative
Then, I wrote my book, A Speaker is a Wilderness: Poems on the Sacred Path from Broken to Whole (Monkfish, 2024) as a collection of poems told in a narrative order, where readers co-experience the journey of healing towards remembering our wholeness. Medical News Today interviewed me on my work as a poet diagnosed with C-PTSD, and how poetry and creative writing heals. I began to get more requests for workshops on this work, facilitating workshops on healing through poetry and creativity. Some poems in my book also serve as prompts, such as “How to Heal and Write at the Same Time.” Multiple readers reached out to me that counselors were using the aforementioned poem as a prompt in group sessions. When I learned this, I wanted to make a short film of this poem, to reach more people who may not connect through books, and collaborate with organizations to amplify their advocacy and drive funds and resources to our intersecting communities. Concurrently, this prompt continues to live in workshops for writing poetry that supports resiliency and recovery.

One Umbrella
These organically evolved into Speak Wild, connecting cohesively under one umbrella, to expand our greater collective capacity: to partner with organizations doing incredible work, augment their advocacy and direct funds to the communities they support, while amplifying the authentic stories of targeted communities.

As a queer, neurodivergent poet and filmmaker with “invisible” disabilities, I’m launching “How to Heal and Write at the Same Time” as a multidimensional project celebrating Queer & Trans Joy through video portraiture of our communities and poetry, in collaboration with deaf ASL speakers, to tell and transform our own narratives, amplify advocacy and drive funds and resources to organizations serving our intersecting communities. For this first project, we are thrilled to have already worked with inclusive talent agencies with accessibility riders, to feature LGBTQ2IA+ talent with disabilities on all of our own terms. Reach out for more about this.
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Thank you for being part of this project. I’m excited for what we can do, together.

— Anna Goodman Herrick