Salvador Andrade Arévalo was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and raised in the Chicagoland area. He is a trained printmaker that works primarily in painting, drawing, and installation. 

He received both his BA (2010) and MFA (2022) in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University, and an MPhil in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (2012), with a thesis on 19th century Mexican lithography. 

He has held residencies and fellowships with Fulbright (Mexico), SOMA Summer, Yale University Art Gallery, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Chicago Artists Coalition (BOLT), and Spudnik Press. In addition, his artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Willis Tower and the National Museum of Mexican Art.

Currently, he is a Practitioner Fellow with Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, and is the inaugural year-long resident with Pueblo Unido Gallery. Publicly, his work can be found with projects for JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYC) and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and artist. Author of the chapbook, Glory to All Fleeting Things, her poetry has been published and anthologized internationally in wildness, Interim, and New Letters as the 2023 Winner of the Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry. She is a 2024 CSREA Artistic Practitioner Fellow at Brown University, 2024 Loghaven Writer in Residence, and recipient of a 2024 San Francisco Center for the Book Mentorship Award. Additionally, she has received fellowships and generous support from New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, Kolaj Institute, MASS MoCA and Assets for Artists, Salzburg Summer Academy, PEN America, The Poetry Project, Poets & Writers, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference among other honors. She is currently working on her debut poetry collection, Hoard.

Batiste runs Revival Archival Cards, Collage & Salvage (RACCS) — a mobile arts studio in Brooklyn. Her collages have appeared in Create! Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Southern Cultures, and The BOOOOOOOM Care Art & Photo Book. She has exhibited at LA Zine Fest, Black Zine Fair NYC, and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies Ordinary Survival Inaugural Film Festival. Batiste's practice is rooted in accumulation and maximalism, and she is influenced by beauty, otherworlds, migration, divination and astrology, Americana, archives, and what remains. Her work centers Black women—and examines themes of freedom, the complexity of memory, what we consider history, and the ways we all inherit and collect possessions and stories.

Deidra "Dayntee" Braz has been dancing since the age of 8, beginning with street dance in Hip-Hop and Reggae. She has been doing the style of Flexing for over 15 years, since the style was born. She is also one of first female Flexers, and has been touring every summer for the last four years with an amazing group displaying the style of Flexing and its abilities of storytelling through dance. 

Trinh Mai is a California-based interdisciplinary visual artist of second-generation Vietnamese American heritage, exploring the refugee and immigrant experience through a range of media. Her work addresses themes of war, survival, collective healing, hope, and the responsibility of inheritance, re-imagining personal and inherited memories, family roots, and spiritual connections. Mai’s passion for collaborative arts is reflected in her involvement with organizations such as the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association and her work with the University of California Irvine’s Vietnamese American Oral History Project. She has also engaged underrepresented communities through art programs in partnership with Grand Central Art Center and MCLA Arts & Culture, focusing on issues of immigration, detention, and social justice. Her work has been supported by cultural institutions like the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and Harvard’s Provostial Fund.

Mai’s recognition includes the 2019 Walker-Ames Guest Scholar award at the University of Washington, a 2021 Long Beach Professional Artist Fellowship, and the creation of a 185-foot mural on migration and freedom at Los Angeles International Airport. She was named a California Creative Corps Fellow in 2023 and awarded a Visiting Mellon Practitioner Fellowship at Brown University in 2024. Mai’s work has been featured in several prominent publications, including Fast Company Magazine and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Through collaborations with museums, schools, and refugee organizations, she has developed fine art projects and arts education programs for survivors of war and displaced communities. Her artistic journey has been documented in the films Arise. Shine. Thy Light is Come. and Honoring Life: The Work of Trinh Mai.

Kym Moore (Director/Educator/Playwright/Producer) is co-founder/co-artistic director of Antigravity Performance Project and Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Moore’s directing style is grounded, yet imaginative. An interest in String Theory, Intersectionality, and Quantum Physics shape her approach to crafting performance. Her works are designed to reveal the multi-sensory, multi-dimensional, and mythic dimensions of reality. Moore is a highly skilled artisan and wily magician of theatrical expression. Her well-honed sense of craft and keen understanding of the materials of theater (actor, text, space, light, sound, etc.) grounds and elevates her work beyond the ordinary. Moore’s aesthetic is designed to feed all of the senses as she creates a multisensory experience for the audience that is hard to forget: “Your Romeo and Juliet changed my whole idea of what theater could be!” exclaimed a now professional lighting designer who had seen her production when he was an undergraduate 30 years ago!

In a recent production of Miss Julie (Chain Theatre, NYC) critic Natalie Rine, OnStageBlog notes: “Overall Kym Moore’s direction is crisp and snappy with not a minute wasted. In Moore’s masterful hands, Miss Julie is a stirring invitation to wake up, an invigorating exploration of choice and consequence, gender and class, freewill and authority that will make you will want to lean forward in your chair to not miss a beat.”
Attention to detail, clear storytelling, imaginative and cohesive design is her hallmark. Experienced. Forthright. Authentic. And Committed to Justice for All! Let’s collaborate on something soon!! Peacefully.

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Mother Country is also short listed for both the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Townsend's first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), won both the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, and was the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. A former broadcast journalist and antitrust lawyer, Townsend has written nonfiction for Al Jazeera and The White Review. 

Jacinda teaches in the MFA program at Brown University, and is mom to two children who amaze her daily.

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, UCross, the Millay Colony, and James Merrill House, among others. Keith was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar, and his poetry has won the Rumi Prize and been anthologized in Best New Poets and Best of the Net. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry.

Keith’s nonfiction has won an Indiana Review Nonfiction Prize and the Redivider Blurred Line Prize, and has been anthologized in the award-winning collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. His poetry and prose have appeared in Elle, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.

Keith’s work in game design includes “Once Upon a Tale,” a storytelling card game designed for Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in collaboration with The Field Museum of Chicago, and alternate reality games (ARGs) for the University of Chicago. He has worked with or taught new media with Kenyon College, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, and the University of Chicago.

Murielle Borst Tarrant is an accomplished actress, playwright, and artistic director with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre and Dance from L.I.U. She has performed at prominent venues including New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theater, and La MaMa, and her one-woman show More than Feathers and Beads was nominated for a Rockefeller grant and featured at the Global Indigenous Theater Festival at the Sydney Opera House. Tarrant is also a writer and dramaturge who has collaborated with I Giullari di Piazza, interpreting traditional Italian myths and creating new stage stories. Currently, she is the Artistic Director of The SilverCloud Singers and Dancers and co-writer of Oops, Bloody, Bloody, Oops.

In addition to her stage work, Tarrant is the author of the Star Song Carriers fantasy series, with six books completed and a seventh in progress. She won a Native Heart Award from the Native American Music Awards for her spoken verse Tears, and her play More than Feathers and Beads was published in Staging Coyote’s Dream. Her critical work, The Spiderwoman Legacy, was published by Miami University Press, and she serves as Editor-in-Chief of EastCoastNative.com, a magazine focused on the political, artistic, and social issues of Native communities in urban areas and along the East Coast.

Becci Davis (she/they) was born on a military installation in Georgia named after General Henry L.  Benning of the Confederate States Army. Her birth began her family’s first generation after the Civil Rights Act and its fifth generation post-Emancipation. As a visual artist, they find inspiration in exploring archives, commemoration practices, memory, landscapes and connection to place. 

Becci earned her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design. In 2021, they were the recipient of the Public Humanities Scholar Award, given by the Rhode Island State Council for the Humanities. Becci has also been awarded the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Visual Art, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship in New Genres, and the RISD Museum Artist Fellowship. Their work has been shown nationally in spaces such as the Newport Art Museum, TILA Studios, Biennial of the Americas, the Photographic Museum of Humanity, and Jane Lombard Gallery. 

Becci lives and works in Providence where she is a member of the WARP Collective and serves on the city’s Special Committee for the Review of Commemorative Works. They are also a Lecturer at Brown University where they teach Studio Foundations in the Department of Visual Art.

Founder and Director of Aubin Pictures, Catherine Gund is an Emmy-nominated and Academy-shortlisted producer, director, writer, and activist. Her media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and racial, reproductive and environmental justice. Her films have screened around the world in festivals, theaters, museums, and schools; on PBS, HBO, Paramount+, the Discovery Channel, Sundance Channel, Free Speech TV, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. She won the 2023 Gracie Award for Documentary Producer. Her films include: Paint Me a Road Out of Here, Meanwhile, Angola Do You Hear Us? Voices From a Plantation Prison, Primera, Aggie, Chavela, and Born to Fly. She has served on several arts, media, and justice nonprofit boards and has been a creative advisor on numerous documentary films. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. An alumnus of Brown University and the Whitney Independent Study Program, she has four children and lives in NYC.

SAMMUS aka Dr. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo—pronouns she/her—is a black feminist rapper, beatmaker, and scholar from Ithaca, NY with family roots in Côte D'Ivoire and the Congo. She is the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University as well as the Faculty Director of the Black Music Lab. Since 2010 Sammus has written, produced, and recorded six albums, a beat tape, and several one-off collaborations with notable artists including Moor Mother, Open Mike Eagle, and William Brittelle in addition to her collaborations with video game developers, podcasters, and filmmakers. She is currently completing two studio projects slated for release in 2024.

Dr. Lumumba-Kasongo received her PhD from Cornell University in Science and Technology Studies. Her doctoral research, which she completed in 2019, focuses on the sociotechnical dynamics that shape the development and use of “community-studios”—recording studios that provide high-quality recording tools, professional sound engineering services, and audio training to communities that often lack financial or social access to these resources. Her scholarly areas of interest include black feminist sound studies and hip hop praxis, particularly as it intersects with AI and gaming technocultures.

Since Fall 2021 she has been a member of the steering committee for Brown’s science, technology, and society program. She is also serving as the Director of Audio at Glow Up Games, the first women-of-color led game studio, and she is a member of theKEEPERS, a hip hop collective that is currently developing the most comprehensive digital archive to map the international contributions of womxn and girls across hip hop’s 50-year history.

Toby Sisson spent 30 years as a bartender before pursuing her lifelong passion for art. In midlife, she transitioned to part-time work, withdrew her savings, and enrolled in art school, ultimately earning her BFA Magna Cum Laude and an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Sisson has taught at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, since 2009, where she is known for her courses in drawing, painting, and contemporary art practices. She has received numerous accolades, including the Edward Hodgkins Junior Faculty of the Year Prize and multiple nominations for Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She also served as Director of the Studio Art Program for nearly a decade and earned tenure in 2015.

Sisson's work, which includes painting, drawing, and printmaking, has been exhibited internationally, with notable shows in China, New Jersey, and Provincetown. Her art is in the collections of institutions such as Brown University and the Worcester Art Museum. Drawing on a diverse background—her father’s Mississippi roots and her mother’s Minnesota upbringing—Sisson's art explores themes of hybridity, otherness, and cultural fusion. Outside of academia, she has contributed to arts organizations like ArtsWorcester and the Worcester Art Museum and is a fellow at Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Sisson's home and studio are located in Providence, Rhode Island.

For the past decade, Victor has been working with people to tell their stories. Stories that articulate hard truths, demand change, and inspire others to do the same. As an artist-in-residence, he is excited to bridge City Hall and Boston streets in this project — to play accomplice to individual imagination and to collective vision. As an organizer, he has supported local community leaders to run national campaigns for immigrant rights, stop ICE deportations, and double voter turnout in communities of color. He earned an MFA in fiction from Boston University, and he has a PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied movements for racial equity. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, Longreads, The Rumpus, and The Southern Review, among others. He was a 2020 finalist in The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Literary Contest.

Victor is an immigrant, and for immigrants, the notion of home can be complicated. Yet he unequivocally claims Boston as home, this place that has given him so much, and this place he hopes to give back to. As for his first home, his parents have and always will be his biggest inspiration.

Victor worked with the Boston Public Health Commission’s Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative (VIP), which aims to prevent violence through building and sustaining strong communities where residents are knowledgeable about the root causes of violence and empowered to address them.

Mary-Kim Arnold is an artist, writer, and administrator. A transnational, transracial Korean-born adoptee, her text and textile work explore themes of hybridity, dislocation, racial and cultural identity, and gender.

Arnold is the author of The Fish & The Dove: Poems and Litany for the Long Moment, with a focus on themes of hybridity, dislocation, and identity. A transnational, transracial Korean-born adoptee, her work spans text and textiles to explore cultural and gendered experiences. She is the Senior Editor for Collaborative & Cross-Disciplinary Texts at Tupelo Quarterly and has taught creative and critical writing at various institutions, including Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

In addition to her writing career, Mary-Kim spent over a decade in arts and cultural nonprofit work, focusing on accessibility and inclusion. She has held leadership roles at organizations such as the Rhode Island Foundation, the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, and the Women’s Fund of Rhode Island. Mary-Kim earned an MFA in fiction from Brown University and an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She resides in Pawtucket, Rhode Island with her family.

Colin Channer, born in Jamaica and educated in both Jamaica and New York, is the author of ten books, including Console (2023), a finalist for the New England Book Award. His work, spanning fiction, poetry, and editing, has appeared in prestigious publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harvard Review. Channer’s honors include a 2023 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, a 2022 Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, and a 2019 Amy Clampitt Residency. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Channer's notable works include Waiting in Vain, a national bestseller, and Kingston Noir, which was named a Best Book of 2012 by The Spectator (UK). He has received numerous accolades, including a Musgrave Medal in Literature and fellowships in both fiction and poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. A social entrepreneur, Channer co-founded the Calabash International Literary Festival, which he led as artistic director and chairman from 2001 to 2012, establishing it as a prominent cultural event. His work has been featured in major international media, including Vogue, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY, and lead artist and founder of the non-profit Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc. on the Shinnecock Reservation. In his work, he explores Indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation.

Jeremy was among ten recipients of a 2016 Dreamstarter Grant from the national non-profit organization Running Strong for American Indian Youth. He was awarded $10,000 to pursue his project, On This Site – Indigenous Long Island, which uses photography and an interactive online map to showcase culturally significant Native American sites on Long Island, a topic of special meaning for Jeremy, who was raised on the Shinnecock Nation Reservation. He also created a book and exhibition from this project. In 2020, Jeremy received Dreamstarter GOLD, which includes an additional $50,000.00 in support from Running Strong for American Indian Youth. Most recently, Jeremy received the Artist to Artist Fellowship from the Art Matter Foundation.

Jeremy Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, NY. Jeremy also serves on the advisory board of the Boys & Girls Club of Shinnecock Nation, The Church of Sag Harbor, Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc., and WNET Group’s THIRTEEN/WLIW Community Advisory Board.

He lives and works in Southampton, New York, on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.

Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez (AfroZapotec) is a scholar, creative writer, cultural critic, and visual artist from Oaxaca, México.

They have two academic projects. One that attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented Black migrants in the United States, and how they respond to local and global Black resistance movements while surviving their illegalization; and a second project on AfroMexican contemporary visual culture, a study that reads cartoon strips, ceramic objects, photographs, performances, murals, film and television, collages, and ephemera primarily in Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Edomex.

Dr. Pelaez Lopez’s debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are also the author of the chapbook to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona Press, 2023).

In their collages, installations, and intervention art, they excavate erased histories of African and African diasporic resistance in Latin America, massacres and disappearances of Indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America, and alternative futures where Black Latin Americans live with ease, abundance, and rest.

Alan’s cultural criticism appears in The Architectural Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, The Nation, and more.

Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work incorporates archival research, somatic studies, and dialogical practices, supporting often overlooked narratives of intersectional identities.

Metaferia’s solo exhibitions and projects include Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2024 and 2017); Center for Book Arts, New York, NY (2024); RISD Art Museum, Providence, RI (2022-2023); and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021-2022). Her work was included in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates. Group exhibitions include Blaffer Museum of Art, Houston, TX (2024); ICA San Francisco, CA (2023); Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023); The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI (2019); and Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Art Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2019). Her work is in the permanent collection of institutions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; KADIST, Paris, France; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY.

Metaferia received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, Bemis, Recess Art, Project for Empty Space, and Silver Art Residency. Her work has been written about in publications including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, and ARTNews. Metaferia is an Assistant Professor at Brown University in the Visual Art department, and lives and works in New York City.

Leslie Tai (b.1983) is a Chinese-American filmmaker hailing from San Francisco, California. After graduating from UCLA with a B.A. in Design|Media Arts, Leslie moved to China on a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship in 2006. There, she earned her filmmaking chops in the underground Chinese documentary world as a student of Wu Wenguang, a founding figure of the New Chinese Documentary Movement. From 2007-2011, she made and exhibited films as an artist of Wu's Beijing-based studio, Caochangdi Workstation. Tai is recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital Award and a graduate of the MFA Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University. Her short films have premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, Visions du Réel (Nyon), International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and broadcast on The New York Times.

Tai's work chronicles the dreams, anxieties, and consumer desire of China’s rising middle class and the Chinese diaspora from a distinctly female perspective. She is currently in post-production on her feature debut How to Have an American Baby.

k. funmilayo aileru is an artist and culture bearer who holds more than a decade of experience in community-based facilitation and design. i collaborate with people and communities who are committed to co-creating a just, future world. in my work, i am concerned with cultivating access, accountability, and cooperation within and beyond my communities.

Much of my work visualizes what Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty might look like beyond our current conditions. i am a multimedium artist and culture bearer who mostly works in traditional craft, visual art, graphic design, and education.
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i am a descendant of the Yoruba people and an enrolled member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. i reside on my ancestral homelands with my partner and our child.

Joan Naviyuk Kane is an Inupiaq poet and writer from Alaska, with family roots in Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo). Her recent works include Ex Machina (2023) and Dark Traffic (2021), and she has published multiple poetry collections and co-edited anthologies, including Circumpolar Connections (forthcoming). Kane’s numerous awards include the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Book Award, and the Alaska Literary Award. She has also received residencies from prestigious organizations like the Lannan Foundation and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute.

Kane has taught at Harvard University, Tufts University, and Scripps College, where she held the Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism in 2021. She has been deeply involved in Native American and Indigenous Studies, including as a lecturer in Tufts' Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at Reed College in Oregon, where she lives with her children.

Ari is a cultural practitioner, an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges from photography and collage to performance art. He is on the faculty of Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA.

Graduating with Honors in Fine Arts from Brandeis University, he was awarded the Rosalind W. Levine Award. He then earned his MA in Art and Education at Columbia University, and an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). He has pursued a studio practice committed to challenging the canon from the perspective of a narrative lens of cultural competency.

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books), Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Penguin Random House), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of 20^th Century Japanese Poetry (forthcoming, New Directions). She teaches at Brown University in the Department of Literary Arts.

Xan Forest Phillips, a poet hailing from rural Ohio is the acclaimed author of Hull (nightboat books, 2019) and a recipient of the Whiting Award. He is the 2024-2026 Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in writing and publishing at Cleveland State University, and has received fellowships in the past from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, the Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award, the 2023 Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, and a 2022 Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grant. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Czech, and Slovenian. Xan’s poetry can be found in Berlin Quarterly Review, Bomb Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is represented by Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky (b. Providence, RI) is a multidisciplinary artist. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital to produce Sacred Geometry, a series of hand-cut photographic collages and How to build a wall and other ruins, a project that includes a multi-channel video installation and live performances. Recent exhibitions include: Hors Pistes at Centre Pompidou [Malaga, SP], Jugar con los ojos cerrados; Cien Años de Surrealismo at RGR (CDMX) and Re-Collections at the LatinX Project (NYC). How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins premiered at the XVth Cuenca Biennial, curated by Blanca de la Torre in December 2021. Other important international exhibitions include her participation in Impermanence, the XIII Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) curated by Dan Cameron in 2016 and There is always a cup of sea for man to sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2010).

Skvirsky's work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows including: Museo de la Ciudad, Cuenca, EC (2021), Photoville, The Clemente, NY NY (2021), Museo Amparo, Puebla, MX (2019), Centro de la imagen, CDMX (2018), Centro de arte contemporaneo Quito, EC (2018), The Deutsche Bank, NY, NY (2018), Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2017), Ponce + Robles Gallery, Madrid, SP (2017), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2016), Hansel & Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, NY, NY (2014) and others.