Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia

Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia is a formerly unhoused, incarcerated poverty scholar, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher, single mama of Tiburcio, daughter of a houseless, disabled, indigenous mama Dee, and the co–founder of POOR Magazine/ Prensa POBRE/ PoorNewsNetwork. She is also the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, co-editor of Decolonizer’s Guide to a Humble Revolution, Born n’ Raised in Frisco, and Poverty Scholarship: Poor People-Led Theory, Art, Words, and Tears Across Mama Earth. In 2011, she co-launched The Homefulness Project – a landless peoples self-determined land liberation movement in the Ohlone/ Lisjan/ Huchuin territory known as Deep East Oakland, the Bank of ComeUnity Reparations, and co-founded a liberation school for children, Deecolonize Academy. Tiny is also the facilitator of several cultural and theatre projects such as the Po Poets Project/ Poetas POBREs Proyecto (co-founded with Leroy Moore), welfareQUEENs, the Theatre of the POOR/ Teatro de los pobres. She has taught Poverty Scholarship theory and practice in universities, street corners, and encampments from Columbia to Skid Row. In 2022, she narrated a short movie based on her children’s book, When Mama and Me Lived Outside: One Family’s Journey Through Homelessness, which has subsequently won 22 awards across the country. In 2023, she began production on a feature length movie based on her first adapted screenplay with an all houseless cast, to be released in 2024.