Contributors’ Bios
Aberjhani
is an author, poet, and artist whose most recent book is Dreams
of the Immortal City Savannah.
Adál
(Front Cover): Baptized as Adál by legendary photographer
Lisette Model, he is one of the most innovative and
celebrated artists working in the early 21st century. Trained
as a photographer and master printer at the San Francisco
Art Institute in the early 1970s, Adál was co-founder and
co-director with Alex Coleman of Foto Gallery in Soho, NYC; an
experimental gallery devoted to photography and photo-derived
works as a fine-arts medium.
Gha’il Rhodes Benjamin
is an award-winning, spoken-word performance recording
artist, actress, self-empowerment speaker and educator. Gha’il’s
performance-artistry was most recently featured on stage in
the heart of Brooklyn at the historically powerful Sistas Place
where she debuted her newest one-woman-show Brave Brown
Women from the Front Lines. She also appeared on stage at
the Schomburg in Harlem in author, composer and actress
Nana Camille Yarbrough’s No Matter What; and from the stage
of the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center where Gha’il’s
powerful collaboration with John Senakwami and pianist Julius
Rodriguez’ band was described as “audacious and electrifying”
by Theatre Pizzaz. Info: www.ghailrhodesbenjamin.com.
Pamela Booker
is an Interdisciplinary Writing Artist and Sustainability Enthusiast.
An author of more than 10 plays/performance works, she is
featured in the critically acclaimed anthology Blacktino Queer
Performance, Duke Univ. Press and is a Lambda Awards Finalist.
This past fall, Cranky Chariots, a flash fiction/speculative story
was published by Akashic Books and essays have appeared in
the Anthropology of Consciousness and various other pop-
culture sites. She is an adjunct writing faculty member at New
York University and a recipient of several Writer Fellowships/
Residencies which include VCCA/Virginia Center for the Creative
Arts, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Norman
Mailer Writers Colony. Pamela is working on Dills Mirrors & the
Lizzies, a collection of speculative short fiction tales.
Carolyn A. Butts,
a poet and documentarian, will publish her first chap book
Loved: a working class girl’s song in summer 2020.
Chanel Dupree
is a 25-year-old filmmaker and poet from Brooklyn, NY. Chanel
has performed and taught workshops at the United Nations,
Yale University, Saint John Fisher college and many more.
Chanel’s workshops center around developing multi-layered
characters, Black girlhood and cultural appropriation. Her work
has been published by the Huffington Post. Chanel premiered
her first short film, Shoulders in May 2018, which she wrote
and directed. That film is now streaming on AuroreTV and was
featured on Shadow & Acts’ #ShortFilmSaturday list. Chanel’s
passion is to create art that reflects and shines a light on the lives
of those who voices are usually silenced.
Venus Jones
is more than an author, actress, educator, and poet. She’s a
social change agent waging peace through poetry. With an
MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, she’s
an Associate Professor at Mission College, a MALI Fellow and
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african Voices
serves as a board member for Poetry Center San Jose. This
former MTV intern and accomplished actress also opened for
Def Poetry on Broadway. Her play “Race and War: An Awkward
Conversation” was featured at the Tampa Bay Theatre Festival,
and “Poetic Soldier” was awarded “Most Inspiring Solo
Performance” at the Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival. She
is the author She Rose, Lyrics for Langston and Kwanzaa: Living
on Principle and four spoken word albums. Her favorite quote is
by Alice Walker: “The most common way people give up their
power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Halifu Osumare, Ph.D.,
has been involved with dance and Black popular culture
internationally for over forty years as a dancer, choreographer,
teacher, administrator and scholar. She is Professor Emerita of
African American & African Studies at UC Davis, and has written
two books on global hip-hop, and published her memoir,
Dancing in Blackness in 2018. She has taught dance and lecture-
based courses on dance and culture throughout the U.S.,
Europe, Africa, Hawai’i, and the Caribbean.
Abiodun Oyewole
is a poet, teacher, and founding member of the American
music and spoken-word group The Last Poets, which laid
the groundwork for the emergence of hip-hop. 2Leaf Press
published Branches of the Trees of Life, The Collected Poems of
Abiodun Oyewole 1969-2013 in 2014.
A. Wanjiku H. Reynolds
believes poetry should move you to positive, productive action.
She is a strong believer in the healing balm of Self-love/Sistah-
love/Brotha-love/One Love - Family - Village the core of all things -
first and foremost in the scheme of things. She has authored two
collections of poetry, Cognac & Collard Greens and A Gathering
of Hands. Wanjiku is presently working on a new collection.
Vera E. Sims
is a retired teacher, literary consultant and a curriculum writer
for the New York Department of Education. She served as a
mentor and teacher trainer for the New Teacher Institute at
Teachers College and the Middle School Instructional Specialist
for NYC. She holds two Master of Arts degrees in Education and
attended the School of Visual Arts. She also worked exclusively
with Project LEAP (Learning through an Extended Arts Project)
contracted by the New York Department of Education, to help
empower students across the city to identify various issues
within their community through the creation of art exhibitions.
The Grace Project
(Back Cover) is a collection of empowering and transformative
portraits by photographer Charise Isis that reveal the courage,
beauty and grace of women who have had mastectomy surgery
as a result of breast cancer. Highly sensitive collaborations
between the photographer and her subjects, the images
confront the narrow definition of beauty in a culture that
commodifies and sexualizes the female body. The Grace Project
shifts that paradigm, for all women, those affected by breast
cancer, and all who struggle with their imperfectly perfect
bodies. Charise has photographed over 400 women (and some
men) who have had mastectomy surgery as a result of breast
cancer. For information visit www.the-grace-project.org.