Description:
In a world fractured by AI collapse and ecological ruin, a band of mystics, coders, and survivors discover that the future may not be rebuilt through power-but through memory, song, and ancestral wisdom.
Brief description: Diane Ford Dessables is a storyteller, minister, and cultural worker whose life's calling unfolds at the meeting place of faith, justice, and healing. Her path turned irrevocably toward this work in 2009, during a visit to Haiti, when ancestral memory and present-day reality braided together in a way she could not ignore.Her lifelong commitment to voice and liberation is deeply personal-shaped in part by her early years navigating dyslexia and not learning to read or write until age twelve. That journey from silence to self-expression fuels her belief in the transformative power of story and the resilience of the human spirit. On Juneteenth 2019, she opened the Gemstones in the Sun blog-a gathering place for reflections on belief, shifting values, and shared resources among people of color in the United States. A year later, she founded Gemstones in the Sun Incorporated, a nonprofit that creates spaces for global communities of color to heal from the harms of modernity-cultural norms and the subtle ways it entangles us all.Her ministry and activism have spanned decades and continents-from grassroots campaigns in Virginia's Tidewater region to global anti-hunger initiatives through Bread for the World and vocational work for the 6,000 congregations of the United Church of Christ. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communicative and Performing Arts, with a concentration in Theatrical Directing from the University of the District of Columbia, as well as master's degrees in both Divinity and Communication (specializing in journalism) from Boston University. She weaves together performance, media, storytelling, religion, and society into her justice work. A native of the Washington, D.C. area, Diane is a bisexual woman, a member of the recovery community, and the joyful spouse of Djalòki Dessables of Haitian descent. Together they are parents to four adult children. She uses she/her pronouns.
Review Quotes:
"Finally-a story where code isn't numbers but living language. We Were Seeds made me want to build tech that remembers where it came from."
- Asha Karim, software developer and open-source activist
"This book reads like prophecy and prayer braided together. It's a reminder that spirituality isn't an escape from the world-it's how we help heal it."
- Marisol Vega, interfaith minister & meditation teacher
"What moved me most is how queer love and kinship aren't added on but rooted in the soil of the story itself. Zora and Samira's bond, Tariq's altered embodiment, Elijah's haunted tenderness-together they remind us that liberation is always queer at its core."
-Renée Thomas, poet and queer futurist
"As someone who spent years chasing optimization, We Were Seeds shook me awake. This is the future tech was meant to serve."
- Noah Wright, former Silicon Valley engineer
"I saw my own recovery journey in these pages-messy, miraculous, and deeply human. This book is medicine."
- Tanya Brooks, CODA recovery services advocate