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Contributors Bios
Amber Atiya is a poet, performer, and self-taught artist-in-training. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, PEN America, and elsewhere. A proud native Brooklynite, she is a member of a women’ s writing group and author of the fierce bums of doo-wop published by Argos Book in 2014.
Ariana Brown is an Afromexicana poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a B. A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion, and is currently working on her first manuscript. Her work is published in Huizache, Rattle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and is forthcoming in ¡ Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin @ Poets from Arte Público Press.
Sarita Nyasha Cannon is Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University where she teaches 20th-century American Literature. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an A. B. in Literature, earned a Ph. D. in English from University of California, Berkeley, and held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in American Indian Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Cannon’ s scholarship has appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities, The Black Scholar, Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, Callaloo, and MELUS. She is also a classically trained soprano who sings with various groups throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Kieyan Chauhan is a 17 year old, self-taught artist from the South East of England. He specialises in portraiture and also creates music under the name‘ Kayncee’. He is currently a full time student studying music and art and is an avid Hip-Hop fan. Find him on Facebook under‘ Kieyan’ s Drawings’ and on Instagram @ kieyanchauhan.
DJ Lynnée Denise, an artist and scholar, incorporates self-directed project based research into interactive workshops, music events and public lectures that provide the opportunity to develop an intimate relationship with under-explored topics related to the cultural history of marginalized communities. She is inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. With support from the Jerome Foundation, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, The BiljmAIR artist residency( Netherlands) and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant, she has been able to resource her performative research on a local, national and global level.
Joel Dias-Porter( aka DJ Renegade) was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, and a former professional DJ. From 1994- 1999 he competed in the National Poetry Slam,
african Voices and was the 1998 and 99 Haiku Slam Champion. His poems have been published in; Time Magazine, The Washington Post, POETRY, Mead, The Offending Adam, Best American Poets 2014, Callalloo, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Red Brick Review, Asheville Review, Beltway Quarterly and several anthologies.
Jocelyn Goode: See The Gallery.
Jonathan Guy-Gladding( JAG):“ The best thing that ever happened to me was being sent to the Caribbean in 1999 … I applied to be a volunteer in the Peace Corps and had the great fortune to be sent to the island of St. Lucia in July of 1999. Serving as a woodwork instructor in the beautiful southern coastal village of Laborie, I found there an unending supply of rich subject matter in the faces and postures of the uniformed schoolchildren, the people going about their daily lives, and the traditional cultural aspects that make St. Lucia such a wonderful and distinctive place.
Shani Jamila is an artist and cultural worker whose travels to more than forty countries deeply inform her collage, text and documentary photography practice. Her work, which addresses themes of identity, political imagination and witness, has been exhibited at institutions including the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, SCOPE Art Fair, Corridor Gallery, the City College of New York and Princeton University. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture filmed an interview about her life and work for their inaugural exhibit“ A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond.” A Fulbright scholar with over a decade of leadership in designing and executing programs that use the arts to catalyze social change, Jamila currently serves as a managing director of the Urban Justice Center in New York City.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina from New York City. She is a graduate of Drew University’ s Poetry & Poetry in Translation MFA program & a Canto Mundo Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in The Wide Shore, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and among other publications. Her first collection of poetry The Pink Box is published by Willow Books and was long-listed for the PEN America Open Book Award.
Aimiende Negbenebor: Creator of the award-winning short film Asa, A Beautiful Girl, Aimiende Negbenebor Sela hails from Benin City, Nigeria. After moving to New York in the late‘ 90s, she went on to earn a degree in Computer Engineering and Literature from Stevens Institute of Technology. After a number of years of trudging along in the I. T. world, she made a life-altering decision to leave and pursue her true passion— the arts.
Julian Randall is a performance poet, educator, and arts education advocate. A Chicago native, Randall has pursued a career in poetry since 2011. A two-time national college slam competitor Randall also