Belvie Rooks

Belvie Rooks and her late husband Dedan Gills are co-founders of Growing a Global Heart, a project and vision designed to inspire the ceremonial tree planting of memorial trees to honor the forgotten souls of the past as part of a process of collective healing and also to aid in the struggle against catastrophic climate change. Ceremonial plantings have occurred along the the Underground Railroad in the US and Canada and along the TransAtlantic Slave Route in West Africa. Ritual community plantings for the victims of urban violence have also occurred in Oakland and Los Angeles. Belvie is also an essayist, educator, and human rights and social justice activists whose work weaves the worlds of spirituality, feminism, and ecology. As an educator, she was a member of the founding faculty of the College of Social Justice at the State University of New York (SUNY) Old Westbury. She also serves as Visiting Faculty at Naropa University's Graduate Program in Environmental Studies. Her published works have appeared in many publications and anthologies including: My Soul is a Witness: African American Women's Spirituality; Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, Global Chorus: 365 Voices on the Future of the Planet (with a new introduction by Jane Goodall) ; Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women's Voices; The Power of Love: Transformed Heart Changes the World. She is an American Book Award winner as senior editor of Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris, and a co-producer (with filmmaker Damani Baker and Danny Glover) of the award-winning documentary The House on Coco Road (on Netflix). She is the co-author of I Give You the Springtime of My Blushing Heart with her late husband, poet Dedan Gills.