Kate Kahtib is the Co-Director of Seed Commons, a community wealth cooperative. Kate is also a co-founder and worker-owner of a cooperatively-owned restaurant and bookstore in Baltimore called Red Emma’s . This co-op helped to catalyze a city-wide ecosystem of worker-owned businesses over the last decade.

In 2015, she helped found the Seed Commons, a community wealth cooperative, and its Baltimore peer, the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED). In 2018 Kate became co-director of the Seed Commons network alongside Brendan Martin.

Kate has a number of multifaceted vocations: academic, community organizer, writer and co-founder/worker/owner of Red Emma’s, a collectively-owned and operated radical bookstore and fair-trade cafe in Baltimore —just to name a few.

Khatib was born in Florida but spent a majority of her adolescent years in a small town in Kentucky. Towards the end of her teenage years, Khatib jumped at the opportunity to move to a big city, and hence relocated to Philadelphia to study English and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, Khatib found a strong community of radical thinkers comprised of students and activists. This community organized not only around the Mumia struggle and the Gulf War, but also focused intensively on all aspects of community rights issues. They fervently sought to form strong political and social networks, as well as build better communities.

After graduating from UPenn with her Bachelors Degree, Khatib moved to Amsterdam in 2000. Here she continued her studies as a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam. In addition to earning her M.A. in Philosophy and Cultural Analysis and her M.Phil in Cultural Analysis, Khatib spent her three years in the Netherlands programming a series of avant-garde films and running an Info Café, where she gave out free food and offered squatting advisory services.

Khatib returned to the United States in 2003 to begin her PhD in Intellectual History at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation topic would go on to be “Surrealism’s America: The Chicago Surrealist Group and the Historical Imagination.” Once in Baltimore, Khatib helped found Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffehouse, a collectively-owned, radical café which remains at the center of her life and political development.

(Adapted from: https://www.poetryandpower.org/kate-khatib.html)