Claudia Rankine is the author of six books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays, among them HELP (The Shed, NYC, 2020) and The White Card (ArtsEmerson/American Repertory Theater, 2018; published by Graywolf Press, 2019); as well as numerous video collaborations. Her collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020, and her forthcoming project, TRIAGE, will be released by Graywolf in 2026. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.
Nuar Alsadir is the author of a book of nonfiction, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and two poetry collections, including Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.
Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks is the associate curator for modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute and the first African American curator for Getty. In this position his job entails helping to found Getty’s collections of African American artist archives. In this capacity Dr. Brooks is the curator and co-curator of a number of archives at Getty: the Johnson Publishing Company (with the National Museum of African American History and Culture), Paul R. Williams, EJ Montgomery, Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, and Maren Hassinger, among others.
Bruno Ceschel is the founder and director of Self Publish, Be Happy and a visiting lecturer at École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL). He founded Self Publish, Be Happy in 2010, and has since organised events at leading arts institutions including Tate Modern (Britain), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), MoMA PS1 (United States) and the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), and published books by Lucas Blalock, Carmen Winant, Lorenzo Vitturi and many more.
Melody Howse is a researcher and artist scholar currently completing a postdoc fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology where she is completing a book project on Black experience in Berlin. She is a prior Leverhulme recipient and has contributed to edited volumes such as Ambivalent Activism (Bristol University Press, 2025), To Exist is to Resist Black Feminist Thought in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019). Her film work has been screened internationally and at festivals such as WXOOL Afrofeminist festival in France.
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is associate professor of Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame. A Senior Ford Fellow, she is the author of Reading on the Edge: Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce and Baldwin (2000). Her work, both published and forthcoming, has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Angelaki, Modern Fiction Studies and Review of International American Studies, among others, where she has written on modernism, cultural, feminist and critical race theories, the Americas, and 19th and 20th century American and African American literature. Between 2007 and 2017, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Review of International Studies, where she also edited or co-edited several special issues. Several op eds placed in Ms. Magazine and the Chicago Tribune (as well as other venues) represent her more public-facing work. She is currently working on a monograph examining the idea of human through the lenses of law, utopia and AI .
John Lucas is a photographer and filmmaker. In 2014, he completed his first feature-length documentary film, The Cooler Bandits, awarded best documentary at the 2014 Harlem International Film Festival. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, REDCAT, OK Harris Works of Art, MSU Broad, KADIST, The James Gallery, Pioneer Works, CC: World, La Panaderia, Aeroplastics Contemporary, Fieldgate Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. His work has appeared in Vogue, BOMB, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Art Forum.
Jackie Murray is an Associate Professor of Classics at the State University at Buffalo. Her research areas and publications are in Hellenistic and Latin Poetry, Race and Ethnicity in Antiquity, and Black Classicisms, especially the reception of Classics in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. Her monograph, Neikos: Apollonius’ Argonautica and the Poetics of Controversy, is under contract with Harvard University Press, she has another book project with Yale University Press, Race in Greek and Roman Epic. With Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Jackie is writing a textbook, “Understanding Race in Antiquity,” and with David Kaufman, “The Idea and Image of Slavery in Plato’s Dialogues.” She is editing the Cambridge Companion to Race and Classics with Elena Giusti and Rosa Andújar.
Jess Row is a novelist, essayist, and critic. He’s the author of seven books, including the novels Your Face in Mine and The New Earth and the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His current projects are a book of short stories, Storyknife (2026) and a new collection of essays, On Being Short: Men, Masculinity, and Not Measuring Up (2027). He’s a Clinical Professor of English at NYU and lives in Manhattan and Plainfield, Vermont.
Russell Salmon is Director of Public Programs, and lead on The Performance Project at the gallery Hauser & Wirth, where he continues to push boundaries within the gallery model to galvanize, gather and foster community within Los Angeles and New York City. Artist collaborations include Okwui Okpokwasili, EJ Hill, Morgan Bassichis, Wu Tsang, Jeremy O. Harris, Charles Gaines, Zoe Leonard, David Hammons, Gary Simmons, Savion Glover, Davóne Tines, Saint Heron, The House of AWT Project, WordsUncaged, among many others.
Emily Skillings was born in Brunswick, Maine and received degrees from The New School (B.A. in Dance and Writing, 2010) and Columbia University School of the Arts (M.F.A. in Poetry, 2017) where she was appointed as a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow. Her first full-length collection, Fort Not, was published by The Song Cave in 2017, and was a finalist for the 2018 Believer Poetry Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Backchannel (Poor Claudia) and Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants (No, Dear/ Small Anchor Press). Recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, jubilat, Hyperallergic and elsewhere. Her work has been included in both the Pushcart Prize Anthology (2017) and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (2017). She has taught creative writing and interdisciplinary studio courses at Poets House, Columbia University, The New School, and through Brooklyn Poets.
Since 2009, Skillings has been an active member of Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist literary collective, event series, and nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn that promotes the work of experimental women writers.
Rune Steenberg is an anthropologist working on Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Uyghurs. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in XUAR, Central Asia, China and Indonesia and published widely on topics ranging from kinship to cross border trade, informality, corruption, narrative and mass incarceration. Rune received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 2014 and is currently a researcher at Palacky University Olomouc. Since 2018 Rune has also been working as an Uyghur interpreter for asylum seekers, activists, journalists and human rights organisations and has participated in several documentary films on the tragedies in XUAR.
David Sterling Brown—Associate Professor of English at Trinity College—is author of Shakespeare’s White Others and the forthcoming Shakespeare Under the Hood—both with Cambridge UP. A 2021 ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellow, Brown has published numerous peer-reviewed and public-facing articles and delivered myriad invited talks. In 2023, he launched his “Visualizing Race Virtually” art exhibition that showcases 39 Folger Shakespeare Library digital images. You can access his virtual-reality art gallery and explore his contributions to the humanities at www.DavidSterlingBrown.com
Dr Wilson Villaverde is a writer, educator and curator of artistic inquiry. The focus of his research involves connecting art with other disciplines and processes. Current research involves creative health across art and cultural practices with an emphasis on disability, race and gender titled: What you do for us, without is, is against us. Since completing a doctorate at the Royal College of Art, co-edited publications include: Memories of the Future: On Countervision (Peter Lang 2017), The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu (Routledge 2018), alongside occasionally writing for Art Monthly, ArtReview, ArtReview Asia and TATE among others. Wilson is a member of AICA-UK and held position at Columbia University, New York, University of the Philippines, Jorge B Vargas Museum and at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Wilson teaches at University of the Arts London and the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.