Dana Batista
Dana Batista is a Southern chaos-folk magician and democratic socialist author. Venēnum: A Field Manual for the Baneful Arts is in preparation with Inner Traditions International.
She writes where baneful folk magic, civil liberties, and class war meet. Graveyard dirt and case law. Poisonous plants and police reports. Santa Muerte candles and surveillance capitalism on the same workbench.
No Threefold Law. No pastel witch branding. No love-and-light as cover for cowardice.
Hexes, wards, and community-defense workings are serious tools, not edgy decor. She writes for readers sharp enough to handle risk, nuance, and their own damn power — readers who have already noticed that "harm none" is a policy the state and the church broke on them decades ago.
Celtic and Norse by ancestry. Taíno and Santa Muerte by initiation. Thirty-six years in practice — twenty-six underground, ten out of the broom-closet. The underground years were not a rehearsal. They were the classroom.
Venēnum is a numbered, no-bullshit manual on the traditions most modern witch books scrub off the page. Historical poisoning. Curse work. Thornwork and other baneful boundary rituals. Structural bloodline diagnostics. Covered-name wards. The ethical spine of intentional harm as boundary and consequence.
It is a field manual, not a memoir. Numbered instructions. Impossible to misread.
Southern Baptist mother. Army father. Evangelical hymns for a nursery rhyme, army rules for a bedtime story, and a first marriage she had to fight her way out of in 2014. Those rooms taught her early what institutions and intimate partners do to the people they claim to protect, and what silence costs. It also taught her that the folk magic she was raised alongside — southern, working-class, unbranded, unlicensed, and often un-Christian in ways nobody in the pew wanted to name — was never the danger. The pew was.
The writing carries the receipts.
Decades in tarot, ritual craft, and plant lore. Years spent in graveyards and county records offices, in kitchens and courthouse hallways, on picket lines and altar stones. The kind of research that doesn't land in peer-reviewed journals but does land in the work.
Her writing runs on the same table as her politics. Civil liberties. Class struggle. Bodily sovereignty. The right to be dangerous without asking. She writes political and magical dispatches for readers who know the South in their bones, who have watched the state, the church, and the market close ranks, and who are done being told that survival, hexing, and self-defense are overreactions.
Tools to live sovereign. Tools to defend your people. Tools to care for the community around you. Tools to stop asking permission to be dangerous.
Dana writes from Sanford, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, mothers six, grandmothers five, and has answered to mom for more kids than she can count, grown or not, who needed one. She shares a working altar and an editing desk with a mini schnauzer named Parcha who supervises both.
Speaking, workshops, media available.