Laura Romero López was born in Cartagena (1992) in the echoes of a city that teaches resistance. A black woman from the Caribbean, she is a teacher, researcher and anti-racist. She is a woman who thinks from the skin, who understands writing and teaching as acts of tenderness and rebellion. Her personal and collective pursuits are oriented towards the possibility of existing with dignity, with material and symbolic conditions that allow for full lives and real access to rights. She believes in the word as a space for recognition and collective construction, and in conversation as a way to repair and transform. In her work—whether in the classroom, in community spaces, or in everyday life—she accompanies processes that seek to make visible the multiple ways of being, feeling, and resisting that inhabit Afro-descendant bodies. Her thinking is nourished by the experience, affection, and complicity among women who have learned to recognise each other. Co-author of ¿Te puedo tocar el pelo? De la negación al exorcismo: historias en torno al pelo afro (Can I touch your hair? From denial to exorcism: stories about Afro hair), Laura writes from a place of intimacy and memory to exorcise the gazes that have attempted to domesticate blackness and Afro culture. Her voice walks the line between reflection, storytelling and the political gesture of loving herself with her hair loose, untamed and alive.
