Changemaker Authors Cohort Participants
We are excited to announce the second-year participants of the Changemaker Authors Cohort. Each cohort member is a movement activist and social justice practitioner. Each is also a writer with a paradigm-shifting story to share; a story that we believe can shape how others feel into, think through, and respond to various social issues affecting us across the globe.
Alongside our partners at Unicorn Authors Club, participants will engage in intensive coaching and creative support over the course of the cohort year. This program provides space and guidance for these changemaker-authors to meet their goals by completing their project for the next phase including submission to agents and/or publishers. Learn more about this year's participants below and learn more about the program here.
Chinyere Tutashinda
Chinyere Tutashinda is a Black organizer, educator, trainer, and direct action strategist who is Cali born with southern roots. She is the executive director of the Center for Third World Organizing, and is dedicated to the liberation of Black people and all oppressed people. It is her deep love of people that grounds her work and her approach to life.
Writing Project
Writing Project: Love Lessons for the Movement is a reference for organizers, communities, and people who care about social justice. This project offers guidance and know-how from past movements in a way that is digestible, accessible, and thought provoking while giving context for how these lessons are applicable in today's world.
Pronouns: She/her
Luis Avila
Luis Avila is a writer, radio producer, and community organizer. At age 15, Luis founded a youth publication in Mexico, where he served as editor and collaborator. In 2000, he migrated to the United States and launched a bilingual publication focused on the vision of bilingual youth. In 2004, Luis joined the American Freedom Summer program in Jackson, Mississippi, and made a career as a community organizer. He collaborated with others to advocate for immigrant rights and fight against discriminatory practices, and he has been integral in building political infrastructure in Arizona. Luis has an extensive career as a journalist and has been a contributor for publications in Latin America and the U.S. He has also served as a contributor for radio, TV, podcasts, and print. In 2016, Luis published Nómada Temporal, which was a #1 featured title on Amazon’s travel section bestseller list.
Writing Project
El Rana is a road trip novel taking Julio to Phoenix to reunite with his mom, but they are both keeping a secret that will change each other's lives. This novel is a story of loss, friendship, and redemption that challenges existing narratives of migration and the motivations behind crime and violence.
Pronouns: He/el
Tiffany Yu
Tiffany Yu is the CEO & founder of Diversability, an award-winning entirely disabled-run and led social enterprise to elevate disability pride. She is also a content creator with 200k+ followers across platforms. She is a 3x TEDx speaker and has been named a TikTok API (Asian & Pacific Islander) Trailblazer, a LinkedIn Top Voice in Disability Advocacy, and a Well+Good Changemaker. Her first book, The Anti-Ableist Manifesto, will be published by Hachette Go.
Tiffany has helped to invest over $170,000 in disability initiatives through the Awesome Foundation Disability Chapter and the Disability Empowerment Endowed Fund at Georgetown University. She has been featured in Marie Claire, the Guardian, and Forbes. She started her career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and has also worked at Bloomberg and Sean Diddy Combs' REVOLT Media & TV. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master's from the London School of Economics. At the age of 9, Tiffany became disabled as a result of a car accident that also took the life of her father.
Writing Project
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto is a guide to reframing how we think about disability to go beyond mere awareness of "not being ableist" to being an active anti-ableist and contributing to forming a more equitable society for all.
Pronouns: She/her
Jackie Fawn
Jackie Fawn is a graphic illustrator currently residing in Akwesasne, Mohawk Territory. Her art has been recognized in Indigenous spaces by her vivid depictions of warrior women defending the land and people against modern day colonialism. In recent years, Jackie’s work has begun to enter educational curriculum, environmental organizations, and health campaigns to uplift Indigenous resiliency and healing. Jackie’s recent art has been heavily inspired by the new aspect of parenthood, as it is her forever reminder of the importance of fighting for a brighter future for the next generations.
Writing Project
Rez Dayze is a romantic comedy that follows the lives of modern day Indigenous Creation Heroes. These 'heroes' must harness their primal ancestral powers to rise in the face of colonial forces in the shape of extractive companies planning to put a pipeline through their reservation.
Pronouns: She/they
Akin Olla
Akin Olla is a political organizer and strategist, who currently resides in Philadelphia and writes nonfiction, political comedy, and very short bios. He is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian, an editor for The Forge, and the host of This Is the Revolution–a podcast that uses movies and television to explain revolutionary strategy and tactics.
Writing Project
His nonfiction project focuses on a student organization that existed with so much potential the CIA and the Catholic Church attempted to control it before it was even fully established. For almost a century, students built and maintained this institution, helping to shape and influence the modern left. The recent death of this institution endangers the entire left and makes student organizing more difficult to sustain than ever, but its demise was no accident, it was slowly murdered over a series of decades.
Pronouns: He/him
Thenmozhi Soundararajan
Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit American commentator on religion, race, caste, gender, technology and justice. She is the executive director of Equality Labs and the author of The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing and Abolition.
Writing Project
Thenmozhi’s novel is an intimate portrait of resilience in a dark time.
Pronouns: She/her
María José Román Gómez
María José Román Gómez is a cultural advocate passionate about social justice, female empowerment, and freedom of expression. Born and raised in Colombia, María migrated to Germany 12 years ago. She currently serves as a project manager for international cooperation initiatives focused on harnessing the potential of documentary film for social change and supporting impact production efforts by organizations in South Africa and Colombia. In her practice, she prioritizes heartfelt communication at eye level with partners from the global south, and has recognized the profound potential of storytelling for shifting perceptions and narratives about issues such as migration in the public discourse. As a result, she places great value on crafting her own voice to share captivating human stories from the diverse worlds she has encountered.
Writing Project
Reciclator is a graphic novel that tells the story of Martha Chon, a recyclable waste collector in Bogotá whom María first met years ago when she came to her neighborhood in search of recyclables. María and Martha are co-writing this story together. Reciclator aims to reach middle-class citizens and policymakers in large cities across Colombia and other regions who often stigmatize recyclers collecting waste in affluent areas, associating poverty with criminality, and failing to recognize collectors’ dignity, in addition to reaching recyclers who may not fully realize the environmental significance of their work.
Pronouns: She/her
Liz Ogbu
Liz Ogbu is a designer, urbanist, spatial justice activist, and a globally recognized expert on engaging and transforming unjust urban environments. From designing shelters for immigrant day laborers in the U.S. to a water and health social enterprise for low-income Kenyans, Liz has long worked with historically marginalized communities to leverage design to catalyze community healing and foster environments that support people’s capacity to thrive. She is founder and principal of Studio O, a multidisciplinary design consultancy that works at the intersection of racial and spatial justice. Liz has also held academic appointments at leading universities across the United States and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Virginia.
Her projects have been featured in museum exhibitions and publications globally. Her honors include IDEO.org Global Fellow, TED Speaker, Aspen Ideas Scholar, Droga Architect in Residence (Australia), and LISC Rubinger Fellow. She earned architecture degrees from Wellesley College and Harvard University.
Writing Project
Liz’s book is one of ideas, stories, and practices intended to explore the intersection between grief and space, and serve as a primer for how people can engage in grieving, reckoning, and repair by healing themselves, their communities, and the places that they call home. We often think of grief in terms of emotions, not physical space. But grief and space have long been intertwined, particularly for historically marginalized communities.
Pronouns: She/her
Audrey Kuo
Audrey Kuo is an interdisciplinary artist, abolitionist, coach, and mischief enthusiast working toward collective liberation. As the co-creator of Freedom Verses LLC, Audrey supports individuals and communities in connecting with their values and purpose. Their work is shaped by their identity as a disabled trans person in the Taiwanese, Chinese, and queer diasporas.
Through experience design, live performance, and collaborative project-based work, Audrey explores their belief that the work of liberation asks us to not only dismantle systems of oppression, but also to offer compelling, joyful, just, and tangible alternatives. They lean on play, improv, and time travel as exploratory spaces to imagine beyond our current realities. Audrey is the author of two poetry collections and the short play “Every Story is a Love Story.” They currently reside on unceded Tongva lands and share their home with two cats.
Writing Project
The Boy in the Kitchen is a speculative historical young adult novel following a disabled trans Taiwanese teenager’s explorations of his role in movement work. (Spoiler: He learns that our collective liberation is also about the friends we make along the way, and how we build community with one another.) The book emphasizes the need for storytellers, shared meals, and food justice in movement work and de-emphasizes the idea of a singular hero, in favor of supporting each character in recognizing that they are part of broader ecosystems of resistance.
Pronouns: They/them
Melissa L. Bennett
Melissa L. Bennett is a writer, storyteller, storylistener, and educator. She is an Indigenous auntie (Umatilla, Nimiipuu, Sac & Fox, and Anishinaabe), ancestor whisperer, tarot reader, spiritual mentor and healer. For over 25 years Melissa has turned her love of storytelling and storylistening into a spiritual practice. She serves her community as a spiritual care provider and spiritual mentor bearing witness to the stories people share in order to help them see where meaning, belonging, curiosity, and possibility exist in their lives. Melissa's identity as an Indigenous woman, a transracial adoptee, a person with chronic illness, lifelong anxiety and depression, and neurodivergence has shaped her work through a healing justice lens. She is committed to utilizing story as medicine for healing the past, addressing systems of oppression in the present, and imagining equitable futures where all people are safe, free, and thriving.
Writing Project
Melissa is working on a speculative memoir exploring the stories and lives of seven generations of Indigenous women in her maternal family line. The manuscript asks why, in a matriarchal culture, were these seven generations of mothers and daughters living lives separate from one another, how did these separations impact the family, and how did they affect the passing on of cultural tradition?
Pronouns: She/her
Amanda Mei Kim
Amanda Mei Kim grew up on a tenant farm in Saticoy, California, and writes about the ways that collective power, racism, and nature weave through the lives of rural Californians of color. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, PANK, LitHub, Brick, TAYO, Eastwind Magazine, DiscoverNikkei, and Nonwhite and Woman. Pieces are forthcoming in the farmworker issue of the Common and an anthology of Japanese American poetry. She is the founder and lead researcher for Kanshahistory.org, which publishes the property transfer records of Japanese Americans who had their farms taken during World War II. Professionally, Amanda is a strategist in ethnic media and the food and agriculture fields. She also serves on the board of the oral history nonprofit Voice of Witness and is a volunteer communications director for Hmong American farmers who are being harassed by their local government. www.amandameikim.com.
Writing Project
Amanda is writing a memoir-in-essays that uses her family’s 125-year history as agricultural workers to show how people of color created a more just and sustainable food system. She documents the labor, collaboration, and other practices that immigrants and people of color have used to grow healthy foods—practices that are increasingly important in our fragile food system and natural environment. They created farming cooperatives, packing and shipping exchanges, and marketing alliances. In this system, labor contractors were paid by the Asian and Latino farmworkers and were responsible for providing the best possible outcomes for workers. These interconnected, responsive systems started to crumble when tens of thousands of Japanese American farmers were unjustly incarcerated during World War II, which led to the rapid consolidation of land wealth and the ascendance of petrochemical farming.
Amanda tackles difficult, often horrific, topics, but she does it with tenderness, intimacy, and a sense of responsibility for her ancestors and the generations to come who will rebuild a healthy and sustainable food system.
Pronouns: She/her
Adrien Lorenzo Weibgen
Adrien Lorenzo Weibgen has been part of racial justice movements for almost twenty years as a facilitator, capacity builder, organizer and policy advocate. They've worked with hundreds of grassroots groups and coalitions everywhere from South Dakota to the South Bronx to build a world where every one of us can access stability, freedom and joy. Adrien's work has been published in The Yale Law Journal and The New York Daily News and featured in The New York Times and Teen Vogue, among others. They are a proud alum of poetry workshops at Cave Canem and Winter Tangerine.
Writing Project
Adrien is writing a young adult speculative fiction novel set in a future where humans have rendered the surface earth uninhabitable, forcing people to retreat below the rising seas to create new lives underwater. These communities include both people who are genetically modified/"adapted” to better survive the ocean, and unadapted, socially powerful elites who look down on the adapted as less than human. The novel explores climate, racial, and disability justice in an environment that upends what it takes to survive.
Pronouns: They/them
Nic Santos
Nic Santos, writer and policy advisor, advocates for the protection of cultural and environmental resources in Guam and the Marianas. Nic, a queer Tagalog/Kapampangan, born and rooted in Guåhan, as well as a mother and grandmother to Filipina-CHamoru children, served nearly ten years with the Guam Legislature and was chief of staff to the Legislative Committee on Culture and Justice. Nic taught in the Women & Gender Studies Program at University of Guam and co-chaired Fuetsan Famalaoʻan (Strength of Women). In Oʻahu, Nic worked as a public policy advocate at Office of Hawaiian Affairs, interned with Huliauapaʻa, a cultural resource management organization, and received certification in historic preservation with a concentration in cultural protections from UH Mānoa. Nic was a 2021 Open Society Foundation Leadership in Government Fellow and has MA degrees from University of Guam in Micronesian Studies and UC Santa Cruz in History of Consciousness & Feminist Studies.
Writing Project
Nic’s nonfiction project focuses on the Marianas Archipelago, which serves as the regional frontlines of U.S. deterrence against China. To support the realignment of U.S. military forces in Asia and the Pacific, the peoples of this region have been remarkably and historically burdened; their lands and ecosystems sustaining significant injury. This primer draws from community experiences in Guåhan/Guam in the face of military development, illustrates the importance of narrative change for cultural restoration and healing, and proposes questions and strategies for more meaningful consultation in the Marianas and throughout Micronesia.
Pronouns: She/they
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh was born in Iran, grew up in California, and now lives in New York. She holds a PhD in English Literature from University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation theorizes the racialization of premodern Islamophobia. She is a founding member and executive board member of Race Before Race. Recently, she ran for Board of Education in her small town in New York. She works as a program manager at the nonprofit organization Community-Word Project. Her creative nonfiction has previously appeared in or is forthcoming in Zyzzyva, Boston Accent, Wellcome Collection, Literary Mama, and the anthology My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora.
Writing Project
The (In)visible Muslim Woman is an experimental memoir on hijab. Through vignettes, photographs, essays, and stories from Shokoofeh’s great grandmother to mother, this book engages with an object that is at once aesthetic, spiritual, and political. It meditates on how the author has grappled with, enjoyed, and grieved the ways her identity has changed as she’s worn and removed the hijab.
Pronouns: She/her
Munira 'Mun' Alimire
Munira 'Mun' Alimire is a baby bassist, dreamer-writer-producer, longtime community organizer, and a distant cosmological object. She is a Somali-American artist who grew up in Kenya, and returned to the United States, where they graduated from Stanford University. Munira's interests are broad, from city planning and mutual aid, to the intersections between gentrification and settler colonialism. Their time as a student organizer, and a community-based researcher encouraged their fictional pursuits. Munira is still involved as an organizer, as they also endeavor into the writing world. Munira currently works as a city planner for rural communities and in their free time, they crochet, write fantasy, and longboard. Munira dreams of publishing novels, playing bass in a band, writing for webcomics and radio dramas, and most importantly, living in a liberated world.
Writing Project
Munira’s novel Terra Iniuria is about Ifeoma, a Black freshman at Stanford University, who is assaulted at a frat party. Stanford University was once her dream school, but after this incident it became her worst nightmare. The event is so explosively traumatizing that it opens Ifeoma’s eyes to the landscape around university sexual politics and the demons that lurk, both magical and mortal. Structured through the steps of grief, Terra Iniuria is a coming-of-age fantasy revenge novel exploring recovery, organizing as magic, and critical university studies.
Pronouns: Munira/they
Ayling Zulema Dominguez
Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, mixed media artist, and youth arts educator with roots in Puebla, México, and Santiago de los Caballeros, República Dominicana. Grounded in anticolonial poetics, their writing asks who we are at our most free, exploring the subversions and imaginings needed in order to arrive there. Ancestral veneration, Indigenous Futurisms, and communing with the archive are major themes in Ayling’s writing. What can language do for our resistance efforts? How can we use it to birth new worlds and weave our ancestors into the fabric of them? What to do with all this rage, sorrow, joy—all this inheritance? Their writing has recently been supported by Tin House, We Need Diverse Books, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Ayling continues to nurture community by hosting free monthly writing workshops online, installing interactive public artworks, and hyping up fellow poets at open mic joints.
Writing Project
Ayling’s manuscript is a dance between bloom and rot, body and world, myth and re-narrativization; a sea of poems unearth and re-root Mexican Indigenous and Dominican histories. The book turns memory liquid and nonlinear as an embodiment of historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s notion of “unforgetting” narratives and experiences colonialism tried to bury. The book incorporates decoding, choose-your-own path poems, and more, in an effort to queer norms and subvert current relationships with colonial language.
Pronouns: They/any
Nicole Shawan Junior
Nicole Shawan Junior is the creatrix of SeaSalted Honey, the Afrika-based residency for artists of the Afrikan diaspora, and Roots. Wounds. Words., a literary arts organization for BIPOC storytellers. Their writing is anthologized in The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket 2022) and Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing (Blair 2025). Nicole’s creative nonfiction has been published in Oprah Daily, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Feminist Wire, ZORA, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and elsewhere. They have received residencies and fellowships from Tin House, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, New York Foundation for the Arts, Periplus, and more. Nicole is the former editor-in-chief of Black Femme Collective, prose editor at Women's Studies Quarterly of the Feminist Press, nonfiction editor at Raising Mothers, and assistant nonfiction editor at Slice Magazine. Nicole has guest edited for The Rumpus and the Massachusetts Review.
Writing Project
Nicole’s novel Ire & the Girl, Slice is a dark literary fantasy. Life has had a way of chin-checking the Girl, seventeen-year-old amateur boxer Monique “Slice” Shore. Orphaned, the Girl’s unmothered coming-of-age dishes cross after cross. Sentenced to home incarceration, a foster parent’s vengeance jabs at her chances of keeping unbarred. Boxed out from seeing her pops in the prison wherein he’s caged, she ferociously protects her only lifeline to him—a cell phone. But when a vampiric strain takes over Brooklyn, the Girl must decide what's more important: her pops or humanity.
Pronouns: They/she
Annie Tan
Annie Tan is an educator, organizer, activist, and storyteller from Chinatown, Manhattan, fighting for young people, educators, immigrants, and Asian Americans. For over a decade, Annie was an elementary special education teacher in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Little Village, Chicago, working primarily with students of immigrant diasporas toward language accessibility. Annie hopes to honor the legacy of her cousin Vincent Chin, whose 1982 killing in Detroit led to an Asian American movement. Annie currently manages a virtual mentoring program for Asian American high school youth. Her work has been featured on Huffington Post, PBS’ Asian Americans, PBS’ Stories From the Stage, Edutopia, and on NPR’s The Moth Radio Hour. Find more at annietan.com.
Writing Project
Learning to Speak is Annie Tan's memoir chronicling her journey, as someone who isn’t fluent in Cantonese or Toisan, to know her immigrant parents who don't speak English. She is shocked yet empowered when she learns she is a cousin of Vincent Chin, whose 1982 Detroit killing led to an Asian American movement. With growing purpose, she begins her journey as a special education and English as a New Language teacher in Chicago, teaching kids from immigrant diasporas and standing up for their rights. In this coming-of-age memoir, Annie must learn from her legacy to speak up: for her students, community, and family.
Pronouns: She/her
Aliya Sabharwal
Aliya Sabharwal has been an organizer, strategist, and campaigner since 2015. Her interest in how economic injustice is crystalized in the economy and people's lives came from organizing laid-off retail workers whose jobs were destroyed through Wall Street driven bankruptcies. Aliya led the field strategy in a campaign that won $20 million in severance pay from the private equity firms that destroyed Toys “R” Us. Currently at Americans for Financial Reform, she is building a national coalition of Wall Street accountability activists fighting back against the private equity industry's takeover of other key economic sectors.
Writing Project
Aliya’s book is a reflection on the impacts of economic inequality on everyday lives. Centering the stories of workers whose jobs were destroyed by Wall Street, the book charts their journeys to becoming movement leaders organizing against Wall Street. Also included are reflections from current organizers campaigning against private equity's worsening of the housing crisis. While other Wall Street books center the industry, this book is grounded in stories of directly impacted people and reflects on topics such as how complex processes like the financialization of our economy impacts real people, the meaning of work and how a financialized economy troubles that tension of what is work, and how social movements are forming around taking on Wall Street's greed through structured and focused campaigns.
Pronouns: She/her