Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer Caribbean poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016), and author of a triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press: Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016), M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), and Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020).

Gumbs’ poetry and fiction have been included in Best American Experimental Writing, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and received honors from the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the Firefly Ridge Women of Color Award. She is currently Creative Writing Editor at Feminist Studies and in residence as a National Humanities Center Fellow, where she is working on The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony (forthcoming, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). She is the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina, where she lives.

Brenda Torres-Figueroa is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and art educator, born and raised in Puerto Rico, and working mainly in performance art, installations, and public art. In 2000 she graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and soon after moved to Chicago to pursue her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Brenda is also an alum of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2002) and has participated in collective exhibitions and performance installations in both Puerto Rico and Chicago.

Brenda temporarily returned to Puerto Rico in 2004 and served as a curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santurce (2006-2008) until her permanent return to Chicago in 2008. Since then, Brenda has been devoted to her art education practice and curatorial research, raising her two daughters, and branding her designs through Freedom Effect. In 2018, as her homeland recovered from the devastation caused by Hurricane María she began the process of restaging and curating almost two decades of unedited work that questions the loss, grief, and resistance of the idea of home as contextualized through her recent exhibition series, Dressed as Home and Refuge.

M. Jacqui Alexander is a scholar, activist, teacher, an initiate and devotee of the ancient African descendant spiritual practices of Haitian Vodou, Lucumí and Ifá. Her pedagogic interests are rooted in a commitment to freedom, radical interdisciplinary praxis, and service to the sacred intelligence and healing signatures of plants. She has held teaching positions at several colleges and universities, including the New School for Social Research, Hamilton College where she served as Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Women’s Studies and at Connecticut College where she chaired the department of Women’s Studies while serving as Fuller-Maathai Chair. From there she joined the Institute for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Among her numerous publications are two co-edited collections, Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray: Feminist Visions for a Just World; Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures and her collection, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred—all landmark interdisciplinary volumes which have left an indelible imprint on the fields of transnational feminism, queer theory and queer of color critique as well as critical race theory. She has served as reviewer for several university presses and professional journals; has been a featured speaker in transnational circuits; and co-created workshops on curriculum transformation with her decades-long interlocutor and friend Chandra Talpade Mohanty. She is a ‘fellow’ of the Guggenheim Foundation, a Canadian Social Science Research Council Grantee and most recently the recipient of the Brudner Prize in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University, in recognition of a lifetime of accomplishments and scholarly contributions in LGBTQI+ Studies. She is Emerita Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Toronto and co-creator and Founding Director of the Tobago Center for the Study and Practice of Indigenous Spirituality. Her current project is a co-authored memoir inspired by Kitsîmba, who, at 12, was abducted from Kôngo at the height of the theft of Africans from the Continent and brought to live in Trinidad via Martinique, about one mile from where M. Jacqui Alexander grew up.

Sandra Aya Enimil (she/her) is the Program Director for Scholarly Communication and Information Policy at Yale University Library. At Yale, Sandra contributes to advancing openness by providing strategic insight, information and resources on scholarly communication and open scholarship. She also consults with Yale researchers on using copyrighted materials and assists creators in protecting their own copyright. Sandra is the License Review Steering Committee chair and provides input on licenses of all types for the library. Sandra collaborates with individuals and departments within the library and across campus. She has given numerous presentations on various aspects of copyright and scholarly communication. Prior to this role, she was the Copyright Librarian and Contracting Specialist for Yale University Library. Sandra is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and is interested in the intersection of DEI and intellectual property. Sandra earned her Law and MSLIS degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sandra has BAs in Political Science and Psychology from the University of Michigan and an MA in International Relations from the University of Ghana.

A native of Puerto Rico, Yomaira was born and raised in Hoboken, NJ and is a first-generation high school and college graduate. She is Associate Professor of Global Afro-Diaspora Studies in the department of English at Michigan State University. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College).

She is the author of the award-winning monograph, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020) which examines the textual, historical, and political relations between diasporic Afro-Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Dominican, and Equatoguinean literary poetics. Her current book project, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press), examines the disappearances and excesses of Afro-Puerto Rican island and diasporic peoples through the study of familial stories, archival histories, photography, visual art, and film from the late 19th century to the present. Her published work can be found in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, the Journal of Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, SX Salon, Hispanofilia, Contemporânea, Post-45 Contemporaries, Ethnic Studies Rise, and Black Latinas Know.

A scholar and organizer, she is a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, collaborative study-away project #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and the digital/material site Taller Electric Marronage, and directs the experimental art and pedagogy project the Afro-Latinx Lab. Dr. Figueroa was awarded the 2015-2017 Duke University SITPA Fellowship, the 2017-2018 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, the 2017-2018 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, and the 2021-2022 Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship. She is the PI and co-organizer for the Andrew W. Mellon funded “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $2M Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies.

She has has served on forum and section leadership roles for the Modern Languages Association (MLA), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the American Studies Association (ASA), the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), and served as Vice President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA). Dr. Figueroa is passionate about mentoring underrepresented and first-generation students and co-leads the MSU Mentoring Underrepresented Scholars in English Program (MUSE) which seeks to advise and recruit promising prospective Ph.D. students in an effort to shift the discipline and study of English. Dr. Figueroa teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the department of English and the Chicano/Latino Studies Program and is core faculty in the African Studies Center and the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies.

Felicita Felli Maynard is a NYC interdisciplinary artist and educator. They received their BFA from Brooklyn College, with a concentration in film photography, and use the medium to not only better understand themselves, but their ancestors as well.

Maynard has shown work at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Westchester Community College, Flux Factory, Spectrum Gallery at MCLA College, Photoville in Brooklyn, and Pen + Brush Gallery in NYC. Maynard has been an artist in residence at Smack Mellon, NURTUREarts, and BRIC.

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity.

Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013).

She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop, ISCP, Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center, New Wave, Silver Art Projects and Fountainhead.

She has received awards, fellowships and grants from NYSCA / NYFA, Jerome Hill, Artadia, the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Nancy Graves Foundation, amongst other organizations.

Minaya’s work is in the collections of the Santo Domingo Museo de Arte Moderno, the Centro León Jiménes, the Kemper Museum, El Museo del Barrio and several private collections.

Star Feliz (b. 1992, Lenapehoking, New York, NY) is an artist and healer living and working on Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA). Feliz illuminates the processes of world-building as they braid back together the strands of life within their Afro-Taino lineage of the Dominican Republic and the wider Caribbean diaspora that were so violently fragmented since the onset of European colonization. Working across media, their conceptual installations take the form of maps, songs, dimensions, and talismans. Through the exploration of the twinned histories of humanity and the earth, a unique visual lexicon emerges that embraces the mundane and the unknowable as sacred. Often functioning as wayfinding tools, these interventions bring an inter-dimensional perspective to the forefront and make manifest the transcendent possibilities between the scientific, the intuitive, and the fantastical. While investigating universal phenomena like loss and desire, they engage with the theoretical touchstones of feminist thought, the queer radical tradition, contemporary Black liberation movements and land rematriation. Under the moniker of Priestusssy they create experimental devotional music with the earth through intimate narratives of transformation.

Feliz’ artistic practice has developed in tandem with their healing practice within movements for radical change. After more than ten years of intensive study and community practice, they currently steward their ancestral Indigenous knowledge-ways under the independently-run project of Botánica Cimarrón. Born of Afro-Taino traditions of the Caribbean, Botánica Cimarrón is a brand focused on healing marginalized people’s relationship to the earth through innovative tools and imaginative experiences that ensure the thriving futures of all living systems. In the past, they co-founded initiatives such as Abuela Taught me, an Afro-Taino Two-Spirit decolonial healing space; Homecoming, a QTBIPOC birth justice collective and Lenapehoking Herbalists Collective, an herbal mutual aid hub.

Feliz has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally including The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; The Horse Hospital, London, UK; The Latinx Project at NYU, New York, NY; Articule, Montreal, Quebec; and others. They have been awarded fellowships, residencies, and grants at ACRE, Steuben, WI; Summer Forum for Inquiry and Exchange, Kaneohe, HI; Mohn LAND Grant, Los Angeles, CA; Printed Matter Emerging Artist Publication Grant, New York, NY; International Center of Photography Community Fellowship, New York, NY. Their work is part of the collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / NYPL, New York, NY; The Joan Flaschs’ Artist Book Collection, Chicago, IL; The Library at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY. They are a graduate of the MFA program at UCLA’s department of Interdisciplinary Studio.

Nitzayra Leonor (Carolina, Puerto Rico) es una artista multidisciplinaria que trabaja el grabado, la fotografía, el cuerpo y la cerámica para desarrollar un lenguaje plástico basado en su experiencia, memoria e identidad como negra, afrodescendiente, puertorriqueña y caribeña. Cursa estudios conducentes al bachillerato en Artes Plásticas (BFA) con concentraciones en Escultura y Grabado de la Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico.

Gloriann Sacha Antonetty-Lebrón quien es escritora, comunicadora y artivista afropuertorriqueña. Es la fundadora y editora de la Revista Étnica, la primera plataforma multimedios y revista en Puerto Rico para visibilizar y representar positivamente a las comunidades afrolatinas. Étnica es un movimiento de periodismo de artivismo antirracista y afrofeminista. Es la autora del poemario Hebras y del cuento infantil “Negro, negrito”. Sus escritos también han sido publicados en Caribe en Tránsito, The Sea Needs No Ornament, Revista Letras, Teen Vogue, Maraña y Palenque, entre otras. Gloriann Sacha posee un bachillerato de comunicación en publicidad y relaciones públicas, así como una maestría en periodismo investigativo de Florida International University. Su trabajo ha sido destacado en Oprah Magazine, Diversity Inc., A+J, Be Latina, Remezcla, LOUD de Spotify, mitú, Okay Africa, The Pulitzer Center y en el documental Afrolatinxs Revolution: Puerto Rico. En el 2017 recibió el premio de EnterPrize a étnica como Empresa Social. En el año 2022 fue una de las 16 recipientes del premio de justicia racial: Justice Rising Award de Open Society Foundation. En el 2023, Gloriann Sacha recibió una beca para residencia artística en Bellagio Italia de Rockefeller Foundation.

Gloriann Sacha Antonetty Lebrón is an Afropuertorican writer, communication strategist and professor. She is the founder of Revista étnica. For more than 15 years she has been working in communications for non profits and in advertising/ public relations agencies.

As a writter, she has published the collection of poems: Hebras. In addition to having stories published in the anthologies: Cuentos de Huracán, Maraña of Tejedoras de Palabras, Palenque: Puerto Rican anthology of thematic “negrista”, antiracist, Africanist and afrodescendant. She has also published in the Academia magazine of EDP University, Boreales, Letras Magazine of the UMET, Afroféminas among others. She has been a communications professor at Universidad Sagrado Corazón (where she graduated from), and also at the Universidad del Turabo.

Gloriann Sacha won the social enterprise award of EnterPRize 2017. Have received recognition for her communication work with a Silver Anvil of PRSA, Gold award in SME Digital Awards and Honorable Mention of the Gautier Benítez Poetry Contest of 2014 for her poetry book Hebras.

She is a member of the Colectivo Las Ancestras, Poesía Afroversiva and Collective Ilé.

Altagracia Jean Joseph es una abogada y activista de derechos humanos con una amplia experiencia en la lucha por la igualdad de género y los derechos de las mujeres. Su compromiso con la justicia social la ha llevado a participar en diversos procesos a nivel nacional e internacional, destacando su papel como directora ejecutiva de la Red de Derechos Humanos Jacques Viau en la República Dominicana. Bajo su liderazgo, ha trabajado incansablemente para promover la justicia social y la igualdad de derechos en la sociedad dominicana, abogando por la eliminación de la discriminación racial y de género. Además, Altagracia ha sido conferencista en reconocidas asociaciones y universidades, compartiendo su conocimiento y experiencia en foros como la Hatian Study Association, Caribbean Study Association, Smith College y Barnard College.

Nacida en una humilde comunidad de la región Este de la República Dominicana, Altagracia ha vivido en carne propia las desigualdades y las injusticias sociales desde temprana edad. Su experiencia personal la ha impulsado a dedicar su vida al activismo y la defensa de los derechos humanos. Altagracia ha sido una voz destacada en la lucha contra la corrupción y la impunidad en su país, formando parte del movimiento social Marcha Verde y exigiendo investigaciones sobre los sobornos aceptados por líderes dominicanos de la empresa Odebrecht. Además, es cofundadora y directora ejecutiva de la Fundación Código Humano (FUNCOHUM), una organización feminista que se enfoca en la educación en justicia racial, reproductiva, inequidad de género y conciencia cultural para niñas y adolescentes. También colabora con Diversidad Dominicana, una organización que busca poner fin a la violencia contra las comunidades LGBTQ y aborda temas como el uso de drogas y el embarazo en niñas y adolescentes.

En los últimos años, Altagracia ha desplegado una destacada labor como conferencista, compartiendo su experiencia y conocimientos en diversos escenarios a nivel nacional e internacional. Ha participado en eventos y organizaciones como la Hatian Study Association, Caribbean Study Association, Smith College, Barnard College, la misión en Colombia como parte de la coalición internacional ICPAD, y la comunidad organizada de descendientes de haitianos y haitianas en Nueva York, donde fue reconocida en marzo de 2022 como una de las mujeres valientes que contribuyen a un cambio positivo en la sociedad dominicana y la región. Además, ha formado parte del proyecto Erasmus Plus, que aborda la brecha de acceso a la literatura tecnológica para mujeres empobrecidas en Europa, Asia, América Latina y Cabo Verde. Actualmente, Altagracia ejerce como coordinadora de la articulación latinoamericana por el decenio afrodescendiente (ALDA), continuando su lucha por la igualdad y los derechos humanos en la región.

English Translation:

Altagracia Jean Joseph is a lawyer and human rights activist with extensive experience fighting for gender equality and women's rights. Her commitment to social justice has led her to participate in various processes at the national and international level, highlighting her role as executive director of the Jacques Viau Human Rights Network in the Dominican Republic. Under her leadership, she has worked tirelessly to promote social justice and equal rights in Dominican society, advocating for the elimination of racial and gender discrimination. In addition, Altagracia has been a speaker at renowned associations and universities, sharing her knowledge and experience in forums such as the Hatian Study Association, Caribbean Study Association, Smith College and Barnard College.

Born in a humble community in the eastern region of the Dominican Republic, Altagracia has experienced firsthand inequalities and social injustices from an early age. Her personal experience has prompted her to dedicate her life to activism and the defense of human rights. Altagracia has been a leading voice in the fight against corruption and impunity in her country, being part of the Green March social movement and demanding investigations into bribes accepted by Dominican leaders of the Odebrecht company. In addition, she is co-founder and executive director of Fundación Código Humano (FUNCOHUM), a feminist organization that focuses on education on racial and reproductive justice, gender inequality, and cultural awareness for girls and adolescents. She also collaborates with Diversidad Dominicana, an organization that seeks to end violence against LGBTQ communities and addresses issues such as drug use and pregnancy in girls and adolescents.

In recent years, Altagracia has carried out outstanding work as a speaker, sharing her experience and knowledge in various national and international settings. She has participated in events and organizations such as the Hatian Study Association, Caribbean Study Association, Smith College, Barnard College, the mission in Colombia as part of the international coalition ICPAD, and the organized community of Haitian descendants in New York, where she was recognized in March 2022 as one of the brave women who contribute to a positive change in Dominican society and the region. In addition, she has been part of the Erasmus Plus project, which addresses the access gap to technological literature for impoverished women in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Cape Verde. Currently, Altagracia is the coordinator of the Latin American organization for the Afro-descendant decade (ALDA), continuing her fight for equality and human rights in the region.