The Worldbuilder's Way
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A creative practice space holding worldbuilding artists and business owners accountable to growing, nurturing and selling to their audience through a black feminist framework.
Seed An Identity Rooted In The Truth Of Your Desired Income
Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 @ 12pm EST
Register for free to learn more about the identity shifts our creative practice is inviting us to make to become more aligned financial stewards of the worlds we're building in art, business and public life.Â
You’ll also learn more about The Worldbuilder’s Way and receive an invitation to join us if there’s alignment.
The Worldbuilder’s Way is for worldbuilders who want to grow, nurture, and sell to their audience through sustainable black feminist sales and operating systems. If you want a values-aligned way to generate recurring revenue through rooting instead of hustling, this is your home.
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Your income is a creative practice. Learn how to embody identities and create the systems that honor that truth.
Seed An Identity Rooted In The Truth Of Your Desired Income
Join us inside the free Discovery Workshop to learn more about...
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Core identities artists, business owners and worldbuilders embody to call in their desired income.
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How to develop systems and ceremonies rooted in your desired income and black feminist values.
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Uncovering subconscious fears and perfectionism by transforming calling in money from an obligation we postpone into a ceremony we practice.
We reclaim our power when we approach sales as a sacred skill and invitation into ceremony instead of a sleazy skill that signals "selling out" to capitalism.
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Let that go and invite us into the world you're building, we'd love to meet you there.
"What if it is not an experiment, this creative life of refusal. This rarely institutionally-funded disloyal life of practice for a world as yet unnamable. This insistence on transformation when the bank account screams “conform.” What if this life as an independent experimental artist is not itself an independent experiment? What if it’s an interdependent ceremony?"
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 — Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "The God Of Every Day", published December 22nd, 2021 by Topical Cream.Â
Photograph by Sufia Ikbal-Doucet.
The Worldbuilder's Way Is For You If...
You are tired of being your community’s best-kept secret.
Your sales practice feels inconsistent, avoidant, or spiritually misaligned with your desires and values.
You want a monthly sales practice that builds trust, income, and emotional safety.
You want to replace chaotic launching and algorithmic anxiety with a sacred sales cycle grounding you in the sovereignty of your desired income.
You want to shift your creative practice from a hobby or work you offer for free to how you actualize a life beyond survival.
You want to increase sales for your worldbuilding offering whether that's a physical or digital product, coaching, a course, a membership, a book or a service.
Don’t have an offer yet? Sign up for the free Seed A World Discovery Workshop to learn more about the Seed A World Retreat, a 9-week retreat where you will learn how to create and launch an income generating worldbuilding offer.
You want to audit and align your capacity with a newsletter, podcast or weekly dispatch that nurtures your audience and builds trust ahead of and in between your offer launches.
You want to build and practice inside of a sacred sales system that generates levels of income and ease commensurate with your audacious worldbuilding visions and desires.
You understand you're a future ancestor and desire to be the present, paid, powerhouse in your lineage.
Sangodare Wallace of The Quirc App reminds us “Black feminism” and “Black feminist” are describing a politic, not a demographic. Seeda School focuses on supporting worldbuilders and business owners who desire to be present, paid, powerhouses in alignment with a black feminist politic.
Is it delusion or worldbuilding? The next time someone tells you to be “realistic”, ask them what reality they’re referring to. The one we’re creating or the one created for us?
“The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t happened yet but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It’s the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now.”
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— Tina Campt, “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity.” Listening to Images, p. 17.
Pictured: Grada Kilomba in Conversation with Tina Campt
The Support You Can Expect
Inside The Worldbuilder's Way Membership
Monthly Black Feminist Workshops and Worksheets on Sacred Sales Practice
1ST THURSDAYS
Monthly Accountability Call and Open Studio for Peer Feedback and Affirmation
3RD THURSDAYSÂ
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Monthly Creative Sales Challenge For Engaging Your Audience
GROW, NURTURE, SELL
The Worldbuilder’s Way to Creative Marketing Course and Workbook
12 MODULES + 12 WORKBOOKS
Library of Black Feminist Meditations for Breathing Through Visibility and Public Practice
12 GUIDED MEDITATIONS FOR NERVOUS SYSTEM SUPPORT
Global Discord Community of Worldbuilders
1:1 + GROUP SUPPORT
Monthly programming for reflecting on your erotic sales challenge revenue wins, nervous system invitations and engagement data. Let's hold it together.
About Seeda School
Seeda School is located in Cykofa, a parallel universe suspended amongst the past and the future where cornrows are cryptography keys, data farms are data forests, the weaving loom is a computer and chain link fencing from demolished prisons is used as architectural membrane woven with plant life.
Seeda School is a practice space for worldbuilding, business development and self-actualization through a black feminist framework. Our mission is to make revolution irresistible through the framework of black feminist worldbuilding. Our vision is a generation of interlocking, abundantly resourced black feminist offers and businesses.
Beyond a "marketing membership", The Worldbuilder's Way is a black feminist sales practice space for incubating your story and learning how to scale your impact, power and resonance. We're waiting on you to write yourself into the cultural conversation of our time.Â
“You’ve got to make your own worlds. You’ve got to write yourself in.”
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— Octavia E. Butler
What Seeda School Alumni Are Saying About Seeda School
"After grinding for over a decade in the nonprofit sector, I needed support building a viable, self-directed career path to generate income rooted in my values and creativity. The Seed A World Retreat offered both the practical tools and community encouragement I was seeking to heed the creative call I have been feeling. Now I look forward to sharing this work that feels personally terrifying and necessary, and I believe in my ability to do it using the Seeda School tools. During the retreat, Ayana held space with such admirable curiosity and generosity! If you want an experienced, informed, Black feminist, imaginative hype-person to put a loving battery in your back, sign up for the Seed A World Retreat immediately."
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— Jasmyne Gilbert
"11/10 recommend joining The Retreat with Ayana Zaire Cotton. It was deeply transformative: from re-rooting into new affirmations that better support our world-building to having the guidance and community support to actually build the thing. In 9 weeks!
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For years, I've worked on creative projects but avoided creating a framework because I was afraid it would feel too contrived for both me and my clients. The Retreat changed that: I now feel clear-minded and excited about guiding others through my process (I have a process!). I can't believe what we were able to create in 9 weeks together, piece by piece, week by week.
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The community was one of my favorite parts of The Retreat: it felt living, breathing, and magical. The poetry! The bookish fanfare! The expressions via multi-media! Every week, I felt completely inspired by how the fellow retreaters were translating their interests, desires, and visions into offerings rooted in their rituals, too.
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Ayana's teaching structure, content, and language left me feeling focused and encouraged—two vital things you need when you're world-building—after every class, every session, every week. I loved that their entire approach was informed by Black feminist teachings and guides that moved us through each topic. I come back to our Worldbuilder's Handbook daily, if not for the templates, then for the affirmations.
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They've created an incredibly important, helpful, and inspiring space to participate in if you want to deeply resource your own world-building. Again, 11/10, y'all."
 Karly Borden
"The Seeda World Retreat has been instrumental in bringing my coaching program to light. When I joined, I had just drafted my framework and had a fuzzy idea for my offer. Every single week of the Retreat helped me clarify and strengthen my initial ideas. It felt like starting with a block of marble and then sculpting and chiseling until what was truly important emerged.
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I loved the structure of the Retreat. It has everything you need to birth your offer and business. We had the tools and time to work autonomously and in-depth. Then, we had our amazing Open Studio Calls, where the communal revolutionary spirit made its magic. In between, the asynchronous support via Discord and email was a guiding light and helped me feel never alone.
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Today, just two weeks after the Retreat's end, I started softly launching my program. I may not have been here without the Retreat!
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More than this, the 9 weeks together have been a time of creative expansion and personal and political evolution for me. I'll always be immensely grateful to Ayana and the marvelous human beings I was honored to have by my side during this journey."
Giada Centofanti
“Being led through the Seed A World Retreat by Ayana offered me the sea I know I can rely on to float me above all that attempts to drown me. Each of the nine action steps helped to buoy my practice & deep sense of embodiment utilizing the full power of Audre Lorde's uses of the erotic.
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Ayana's excavating groundwork reminds us that the ability to float already resides in the power of our expansive breath. If we can dream it, then it is safe to trust that it is already done for not just ourselves but folks dreaming of the work we are producing.
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The world you desire to build already exists within you & the worldbuilding framework helped me realize that our work can support so many others if we break through the fertile ground where we stand alone. In fact, through the worldbuilding framework, Ayana facilitates that we are never truly alone because the Sankofa sensibility circularly connects us to our past, present, & future.
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If you're ready to invite folks to wade into the sea of your worldbuilding & transformative offer then sign up! Trust that when it rains it pours & your abundant desires will grow & be witnessed by the outstretched limbs of folks in the Seeda School community with you.”
Kay BrownÂ
"Ayana has created a thriving Black feminist counterpublic that combines the speculative imaginary with the power of presence and action to manifest worlds that exist outside of and beyond oppressive systems, reminding us that we don’t have to cut off any parts of ourselves in the work.
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As a participant in the Seed a World Retreat over the past year, I have found that accepting Ayana’s invitation into communal worldbuilding has completely transformed the way I think about both engaging with and funding my creative practice. Their gentle invocation around returning consistently to our work to build a nurturing cadence of outreach via the weekly dispatch, with its focus on curiosity and research, as well as their guidance on developing an income-generating offer has shown me the value of cultivating a creative ecosystem where all parts feed into and nourish each other.
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I came for the emphasis on grounding our art in interdisciplinary wildness and opacity. I stay for the soft weave of community that grounds us all together in what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “an interdependent ceremony.” Ayana and my fellow worldbuilders are holding each other through this time of escalating genocide and rising fascism worldwide and together we are creating full universes of possibility to, in Christina Sharpe’s words, “imagine otherwise.” Join us?"
Elliott Silverstein
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Solidarity Pricing
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Solidarity pricing tiers and descriptions are borrowed from black feminist worldbuilder and Seeda School alumni nènè myriam konaté. If you're interested in The Worldbuilder's Way you might also be interested in their offering, The Clap Back Manifest(o).
"It’s been so incredibly powerful to see the way each prompt, each assignment, each framework, in such a short amount of time, brings the threads of my practice into harmony and makes it so the universe can clearly respond. I can’t even count the number epiphanies I’ve had since I’ve started working with you. Thank you."
Ravon Ruffin, Founder of Citation Studio
In 90 days, you won’t just have a sales ceremony — you’ll have a sacred, revenue-generating system that expands your visibility, clarifies your leadership, and turns your worldbuilding offer into a dependable income stream. You'll no longer be your community’s best-kept secret. You will be a present, paid, powerhouse...by practice, not accident.
It feels virtuous to say “I don’t dream of labor”, but what if we did? I need us to start dreaming.
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What if you created the most erotic job you could imagine and got to work?
“These scalar experiments and mobile laboratories are speculative projects that envision new modalities of relation and offer blueprints for unanticipated existence.”
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— Saidiya Hartman, “Crawlspace Manifold” (February 12, 2023), published in Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging (October 3, 2023), pg.14
Meet Your Worldbuilding Coach
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Hi, my name is Ayana Zaire Cotton and I'm happy we found eachother.
I help artists build businesses. I coach worldbuilders who are ready to actualize audacious projects rooted in desire. I support writers with holding their writing practices as non-negotiable ceremony.Â
Inside Seeda School we remember, just as we experiment with many methods and techniques in our creative practice, we can experiment with many methods and techniques for attracting resources to support the worlds we're building.
What if we didn't have to wait on a brand deal, art institution, film production company, record label, publisher or university to say "yes" to our ideas in order to actualize them? What if the only "yes" we needed was our own and from the people the work is for?
I have over a decade of experience launching art projects and social sculptures that doubled as businesses while learning a ton along the way. Most of which I teach inside of Seeda School where we work together to discover and build your creative offer, then develop a sales system for recurring revenue resourcing your worldbuilding.
If you're done with being financially dependent on industry gatekeepers of the old world, want to create an income generating offer, have been away from your creative practice for a while or have an existing offer you want to scale into a business — the first step is always saying "yes".Â
Let's work together on seeding a world with your "yes".Â
Photograph by Stephen Miller. Custom workwear created by Ayana Zaire Cotton.
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“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”Â
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 — Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power" (1978)