Ayana Zaire Cotton
Ayana Zaire Cotton is a cultural worker from Prince George’s County, Maryland. Based in Dawn, Virginia — tucked in between the ancestral lands of the Mattaponi and Youghtanund — they are answering the call to steward land that has been in their family for four generations. During a creative biotechnology residency she wrote the non-linear speculative fiction novella “Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story” in collaboration with a creative writing software tool she built at the Recurse Center. Ayana is the founder of Seeda School, named after the protagonist from the parallel universe of Cykofa. Seeda School is a skill building platform for learning how to code through a black feminist lens. Through Seeda School she publishes a newsletter and podcast titled Soft, Where?. Inside the ecosystem of their practice Ayana braids writing, software, abstraction, teaching, and worldbuilding to engage our collective imagination around the technologies we need in the world we desire.