大象传媒

On Feb. 6, 2023, Jen Angel, an Oakland resident, well-known media justice activist, and owner of , was reportedly robbed in the parking lot of a Wells Fargo bank while in her car. According to , Angel pursued her assailant but got caught in the door of their car as they drove off. She was dragged 50 feet along the road and suffered catastrophic brain injuries. Days later, on Feb. 9, Angel was taken off life support and passed away. 

During the three days she remained in a coma, thousands of people whose lives she had touched all over the United States learned of her attack and  into what would eventually become a $150,000 fund to help with medical and other related expenses. 

Angel was a fixture in the community, organizing the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair and participating in countless local and national struggles. She began her political work in the late 1990s and early 2000s, writing and editing zines covering radical political issues. Her most ambitious media project was , which she co-edited from 1999 to 2006. She also wrote stories for YES! 

Although primarily a political activist and journalist, Angel had a passion for baking, and she eventually went on to start her own bakery, turning it into a thriving business. 

Upon her death, her loved ones released a public聽 affirming her commitment to restorative justice and expressing a desire to avoid punitive and carceral responses to her attack: 鈥淧lease do not use Jen鈥檚 life legacy of care and community to further inflame narratives of fear, hatred, and vengeance.鈥� It went on to say, 鈥淛en would not want to advance putting public resources into policing, incarceration, or other state violence that perpetuates the cycles of violence that resulted in this tragedy.鈥�

Among those who publicly shared their condolences over Angel鈥檚 death were  and . In a lengthy examination of her life and legacy, The Guardian鈥檚 Sam Levin referred to her as an 鈥�.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Carwil Bjork-James is an anthropology professor at Vanderbilt University and one of Angel鈥檚 friends and collaborators. He reflected on her death in the following obituary.

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A decade ago, Jen Angel contacted me about a project she was co-founding, soon to be named Agency: An Anarchist PR Project. The proposal, as Jen and her co-founders explained it, was that 鈥渂y creating original, accessible materials written for a broad audience (including anarchists and non-anarchists alike) and promoting anarchist perspectives on a wide range of current events, we will amplify the reach of existing anarchist voices and projects.鈥� There鈥檚 a kind of invitation that is so fluid it feels unnecessary to call it recruiting or organizing, where both asker and listener share political commitments and aspirations that the proposed project embodies, and this was it.

I first encountered Jen鈥檚 work in 2000, when I read the second issue of  magazine, headlined as 鈥淎 Loud and Continuous Uproar of Hundreds of Human Voices.鈥� A smart, clearly laid out, topical, and broadly accessible magazine, Clamor grew out of the punk world that read Maximum Rocknroll, but was always aiming at a potential audience of, well, everyone. 鈥淲e pick a general theme 鈥� something that is fairly universal to all people 鈥� and we begin to tackle the subject in ways that we typically don鈥檛 see the subject treated,鈥� as Jen and her co-editor Jason Kucsma described their approach introducing a 2004 issue on the theme of death.

Clamor was expansive, not niche. Youthful in feel, but open to all phases of the life cycle. It became an incubator of new radical written voices and a mechanism for getting them on shelves in chain bookstores across the country. Clamor refused to separate 鈥減ersonal鈥� and 鈥減olitical鈥� arenas of life, speaking with a voice that was both radical and humane. It was a brilliant collective work in a time of an emergent anti-globalization and anti-war activism, many of whose protagonists were animated by larger refusals of capitalism and the state. Clamor resonated with the energy, ambition, and creativity we experienced on the streets and in our hopeful hearts. 

Clamor and Agency have in common a drive to put transformative ideas and daring aspirations out to the broadest audience possible. This is fueled by a sense that revolutionary politics are not just a form of setting oneself apart from a broken society, but instead a bid to connect to others in order to un-break it. But if desire makes the voice, it is hard work and organized minds that construct the megaphone. And Jen excelled at this too. Jen started ambitious projects, she carried them through, and she accumulated the lessons of doing so. You don鈥檛 have to trust me on this; you can read her reflections on Clamor in her pamphlet , and her accumulated knowledge from doing publicity work for radicals in .

I鈥檝e known Jen Angel as a collaborator in projects large and small, a passionate community builder, a comrade in radical politics, and a friend who has my back emotionally and practically. Somewhere during the time when every activist convergence felt like home, and every project sought a wider audience, we crossed paths between familial homes in Ohio and chosen homes in the San Francisco Bay. Our conversations were precious, grounding, hopeful.

Jen Angel is a person I strive to be like, who lived as a full-throated assertion of why life is worth living, and who loved herself and others and brought the energy and desire within herself and within those around her to the surface. As her life led her to new circles of community, she never stopped making me feel like her space was welcoming me home.

In January 2020, Jen鈥檚 collective house threw a party for her 45th birthday. Set for the late afternoon, verging on dinnertime, it was an all-dessert party to which several dozen people showed up with cakes and pastries, fruit arrangements and libations, each creative enough to brighten the day of someone who spends their working hours baking cupcakes. The crowd was a crossroads of scenes, with affinities for activism, anarchism, polyamory, kink, and queerness all present. Jen seemed to revel in the overlap and took time to draw people she knew from different spaces together. Then, she had the entire gathering form a circle extending through the kitchen, the edible delights between us, and with brash self-confidence, orchestrated a sharing of introductions and memories among us all.

So today, I鈥檓 shocked to have the certainty of her continued presence suddenly and tragically interrupted.

Obviously, there is so much we, her richly tended community, and I, her particular friend preparing to see more of her this summer, have lost. But the greatest loss is the years taken from her, the life she will not have a further chance to live, the life she built and sustained. In this, we, her people, are unfairly advantaged because we will see each other more clearly now, while she won鈥檛 be able to join us.

And now, we enter metaphysical territory because the material isn鈥檛 all there is. But the material is a whole damn lot. And from sugar that is flavored and sculpted as art and as a shared delight, to desire that is expressed rather than forbidden, to friends and lovers who are seen and touched rather than dreamed of, the material is one thing Jen taught me by shining example to take seriously, to show up for, to not sublimate into interior complexity, but rather to go forth and find.

This article was originally published on Feb. 16 at聽, an anarchist public relations firm that Angel co-founded.聽It has been republished here with permission.

This article was updated at 2:29 p.m. on February 27, 2023, to reflect that Angel鈥檚 loved ones released the statement regarding her commitment to restorative justice and to include the correction that Ocean Mottley was her partner, not fianc茅. Read our corrections policy here.