Emanuel Xavier is the author of the poetry collections Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier, Radiance, Nefarious, If Jesus Were Gay, Americano, Pier Queen, and the novel Christ Like. He is also editor of Me No Habla With Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry, Bullets & Butterflies: queer spoken word poetry, and Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry. An Equality Forum LGBTQ History Month Icon, Emanuel Xavier is a poet and author of queer youth and is a longtime LGBTQ rights activist. Xavier is the recipient of a New York City Council Citation Award, an International Latino Book Award, Lambda Literary Award nominations, and American Library Association Over the Rainbow Books selections for his collections. He is the recipient of a Gay City Impact Award and the Marsha A. Gomez Cultural Heritage Award.

As a survivor of child abuse, former homeless gay teen, and member of the House ball scene, he has staged many benefits for queer youth and is a longtime LGBTQ rights activist. Xavier is the recipient of a New York City Council Citation Award, an International Latino Book Award, Lambda Literary Award nominations, and American Library Association Over the Rainbow Books selections for his collections. He is the recipient of a Gay City Impact Award and the Marsha A. Gomez Cultural Heritage Award.

Katharine Wolfe is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. Lawrence University. She works principally in ethics, feminist theory, and continental philosophy. She has published in journals such as Environmental Ethics, Sartre Studies International, Feminist Philosophical Quarterly, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Rethinking Marxism, and more. Her work in public philosophy can be found at Black Issues in Philosophy, Impact Ethics and NorthJersey.com.

Karl O’Brian Williams is currently Deputy Chair and Theatre Coordinator in the Speech, Communication and Theatre Arts Department at The Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY), and an Adjunct at NYU Steinhardt in the Program in Educational Theatre.

He is a Jamaican-born actor, playwright, producer, and educator. His acting career has taken him from stages in the Caribbean to those in New York, Toronto, and the United Kingdom. In 2019 he was co-writer on the short film Winston, which received the following film festival selections: the Hip Hop Film Festival, BronzeLens, Circle City Film Festival, Queen City Film Festival and the African American Film Festival. The screenplay was adapted from Williams’s monologue “The Kept Man.” His play The Black That I Am has been staged in Glasgow and Galloway for the National Theatre of Scotland, and at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. Not About Eve had a successful run Off-Off-Broadway in New York, Queens, Brooklyn, Rochester, Hartford, CT, and North Carolina at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem. In 2013 the play received 3 AUDELCO nominations for Excellence in Black Theatre including Outstanding Ensemble Cast, Best Dramatic Production, and Best Playwright. The Boys on the Hill was a selection in The Culture Project’s 2015 Summer Play Reading series at the Lynn Redgrave Theatre, and for Long Island University’s Kumble Theatre 2016 Pride Month Celebrations. The play is now being developed along with another one-act called Gully Queen as part of a trilogy on LGBTQ+ lives in J Jamaica. Random was a selection in NYU’s ten-minute play festival, and was adapted into a short film by students at the Art Institute of Atlanta in 2009. He was playwright in residence with Theatre Askew’s Youth Performance Experience. Williams’s passion for theatre and education has propelled his work with students of all ages and abilities. He narrated the audiobook These Ghosts Are Family written by Maisy Card and published by Simon & Schuster (Paste magazine’s Top 10 Audio Books for March 2020).

As Artistic Director for Braata Productions, he curates the organization’s bi-annual Caribbean Play Reading Series, creates educational theatre curriculum for after school and senior center programs, and created Braata’s annual events, Bankra Caribbean Folk Festival and Old Time Grand Market. He has shared the stage with Harry Belafonte and the late historian and activist Howard Zinn, and pursues artistic projects that interrogate socio-political issues, especially those intersecting with Caribbean culture, queerness, and immigration.

Dr. Randall Westbrook is a faculty member at the School of Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. He was also guest editor and contributor to The Journal of Negro Education and authored “Elusive Quest: Reflecting on Bell and Brown” for the Harvard Law School Journal on Racial and Ethnic Justice. He received his EdD from Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education. Professor Westbrook specializes in the thought of W.E.B. DuBois and edited the volume, Education and Empowerment: The Essential Writings of W.E.B. DuBois (2013). In a February 2021 interview with of Dr. Westbrook, published in Mom&I Today, he reflects on teaching during Black History Month, “I talk about the Silent Parade of 1917 that Dubois led where there were 30,000 Black men, women, and children walking down the street, silent. They only carried signs, and how that scared people. 100 years later, we have people walking down the middle of the street relatively silent, holding signs, and it’s still scaring people.”

Dr. Arlene Torres is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College. She is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in Caribbean, Latina/Latino, and Latin American Studies. As a public intellectual, Dr. Torres has served as a member of the Advisory Board and consultant to a national project on RACE supported by the American Anthropological Association, National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation. She is Past-President of the Puerto Rican Studies Association and Past-President of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, a division of the American Anthropological Association.
Dr. Torres’ publications include two edited volumes with Norman E. Whitten, Jr. & Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean. “Collecting Puerto Ricans” In Kevin Yelvington (ed.) Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, reflect Torres’ intellectual concerns. Dr. Torres focuses on the racialization of ethnic groups in varied cultural and institutional settings works on several university, college-wide, and community organizations to support the educational advancement of underrepresented communities in higher education.
As an administrative and faculty mentor, she co-directed the CUNY-Harvard Leadership Development Program, the Mellon Faculty Diversity Career Enhancement Grant and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Hunter College. She served as University Dean for Recruitment and Diversity and the Director of the Chancellor’s Latino Faculty Initiative in Academic Affairs in the Central Administration at CUNY.