Changemaker Authors Cohorts

Adam Nyang is a Gambian who recently completed her Bachelor’s degree in English Studies at the University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fes, Morocco. Adam has always been passionate about storytelling and reading. She has recently published a romance novel called Betting on Love under the pen-name Kani Sey with Love Africa Press. Her short story, Faroh, has been longlisted for the 2021 K and L Prize.

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.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons produces award-winning cultural work in documentary filmmaking, writing, and public speaking. Her lived experiences as a survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence, a Black feminist lesbian, and a 20-year Buddhist practitioner inform the creation of her work. She is the editor of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, Love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press), and the producer/director of the 2006-released groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded film, NO! The Rape Documentary. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Soros Media Fellowship, a Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellowship, and the 2019 Breakthrough U.S. Activist Impact Award.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Catherine Hyde Townsend has advocated for the inclusion of people with disabilities in human rights and social justice philanthropy for over 15 years. With deep knowledge about how disability connects with gender and racial justice and sexuality and reproductive rights, she is a recognized thought leader on disability inclusion. Her own disability experience has fueled an intimate understanding about patriarchy, beauty standards, and ableism. She currently serves as the Senior Advisor for Disability Inclusion at the Ford Foundation where she advises leadership on organizational change to advance disability inclusive policies, practice and programs. She often serves as a trusted advisor to private donors, NGOs, and UN agencies.

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.

Chioma Oruh is the Health Justice Project Director at Advocates for Justice and Education (AJE), where she serves as principal investigator leading project implementation alongside a team of advocates, organizers, and directly impacted families navigating DC’s systems of care for children and youth with disabilities and special health care needs. Her work is grounded in her roles as a mother, disability justice seeker, doula, and community caregiver. As a public policy expert and scholar of matriarchal theory, her intellectual north star is the critical re-examination of mother-work as a political framework. Chioma is a former professor at Howard University and Georgetown University and holds degrees from The George Washington University and Howard University.

Denali Joie (she/they) is a Jamaican-born, Southern California–based Black trans femme narrative artist, writer, fashion griot, and culture bearer. Her multidisciplinary practice moves fluidly across mediums, including fashion as textual tool, writing, theatre, photography, film, performance, and collaborative community activations, to tell stories that reconnect memory, identity, and collective possibility. Drawing on Afro-Indigenous cosmologies, queerness, and masquerade traditions such as Jonkonnu, Denali approaches storytelling as both cultural transmission and worldbuilding. Her work treats the body, garment, and spoken and written word as living archives—sites where history, imagination, and liberation converge. Denali’s work has been featured in international exhibitions and supported by fellowships from the California Arts Council, Center for Craft, and the Center for Cultural Power.

Dev’n M. Goodman is an educator and advocate working to grow community culturally and equitably. No matter the initiative, their goal is always to provide access and opportunity to those whose voices and talents have too often not been amplified. 

Devon Hamilton is a food justice advocate with a deeply intersectional background in community organizing, youth education, sustainable agriculture, and the culinary arts, among other roles. He is the owner of a local barbecue and gardening business called Grillin’ For The People (G4TP), that offers community resources and food services primarily in the Leimert Park and South Central LA area.

Diana Samarasan has spent the last two decades advancing disability rights at global levels. She was the founding Executive Director of global participatory grantmakers, the Disability Rights Fund (DRF) and the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund (DRAF), which have provided more than $40 million to disability rights movements across the Global South. DRF is one of the early global grantmakers to embody “nothing about us without us” and include people with lived experience – people with disabilities – at all levels of decision-making. Diana’s work has been featured in numerous publications, most recently in the book, Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good by Giving Up Control.

Ellen Bravo is a long-time activist and author who’s spent decades organizing among low-wage women from a social justice feminist framework. She’s written several non-fiction books, including Taking on the Big Boys. Her first novel, Again and Again, dealt with date rape and politics. Her second, Standing Up, written with her husband and due out March 8, highlights moments when workers band together to stand up to oppression.

Emily Ramirez is a queer Dominican woman, born and raised in NYCHA housing in Brooklyn, and is currently a digital organizer at Families Belong Together and a social justice teacher/curriculum developer at the Sadie Nash Leadership Project and at Girls Be Heard. She holds a Bachelors in creative writing and comparative literature, and has published works in Huizache, Girls Write Now: Two Decades of True Stories From Young Female Voices, and the journal, Wizards in Space.

Emily’s an avid reader and facilitates a monthly book club that centers the fiction of women of color through her book review Instagram at @readwithemily!

Fabiola Santiago is from Santiago Matatlán, Oaxaca, Mexico and belongs to the Central Valley Zapotecs. Her experiences as a formerly undocumented person and her connection to Oaxaca’s rich culture anchors her commitment to community, equity, and possibility. She’s the founder and executive director of Mi Oaxaca, an organization whose purpose is to combat Indigenous erasure through narrative change, cultural education, and collaboration with compatible organizations across borders. Fabiola imagines a world where Indigenous people are attributed for their cultural and culinary contributions and have sovereignty over it. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology and master’s degree in public health from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Fin Leary (he/they) is an autistic and transgender author, a program manager at We Need Diverse Books, and a faculty member at Emerson College, where he teaches in the MFA in popular fiction. Fin is the editor of the science fiction anthology Future States of Stars (OwlCrate Press, 2025). His short fiction is forthcoming in the young adult horror anthology These Bodies Ain’t Broken edited by Madeline Dyer (Page Street Publishing, 2025). His fiction has been supported by a Lambda Literary fellowship, the Tin House Winter Workshop, and the GrubStreet Novel Generator program. Fin lives with his orange literary cat and a rainbow bookshelf outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Born stateless in Seoul and raised on four continents, Grace Jahng Lee is a writer, editor, harm reductionist, and public health practitioner who has worked for two decades with people experiencing homelessness, queer/BIPOC/immigrant communities, sex workers, and people who use drugs. Fragmented identities, memory, addiction, intergenerational trauma, and home are central themes in her writing. She has been awarded residencies, fellowships, scholarships, and grants from VONA, Kundiman, Yaddo, Brooklyn Arts Council, NYFA, Hedgebrook, Hambidge, and the Jerome Foundation, among others. She is a contributing editor at Guernica and the creative nonfiction editor and health editor at Hyphen.

Hans is a writer and artist known for expansive commentary on intersex issues. This work builds on the blessing of a childhood spent among multiple generations of intersex activists, and formative experiences in Bay Area queer comics and activism communities.

While in California, Hans’s organizing and digital strategies as the former Communications Director of interACT helped pass the country’s first legislation denouncing infant genital surgeries. Hans’s articles, videos, and comics promoting affirming and non-medical views of intersex people have been translated into four languages.

Following this, Hans aims to write a graphic novel that will make a banned books list.

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.

Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen (she/her) is a queer Vietnamese American writer who writes about belonging, assimilation, and power. Her essays have been a “Notable” selection for The Best American Essays 2024, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and appeared in Longreads, The Offing, and Foglifter. She was the editor of Emerge: The Anthology for the 2023 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Macondo, among others. A proud native Houstonian, she holds a master’s degree in English from Georgetown University where she was the winner of the Bernard M. Wagner Medal for Excellence in Writing. For the past six years, Nguyen has been a director at a spend-down foundation based in San Francisco, managing the deployment of nearly $100 million dollars to education initiatives across the West Coast.

Jess Clarke is a genderqueer writer, performer, and organizer from Oakland, California. They’ve been on the frontlines and in the back offices of justice struggles for the last half-century. From organizing a cultural center in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in the 1980’s, doing solidarity with the Zapatistas in the 90s, editing Race, Poverty & the Environment in the 2000s, to launching Radio Reimagine in the 2020s, liberation of all kinds —personal, social, economic and political—is the common goal of their projects. Jess has been a featured performer at the Oakland Museum, Oakland Public Library, Marsh Theater SF & Berkeley, Story Slam Oakland and Berkeley Repertory School of Theater.

Beth Howard is the Rural Kentucky Campaign Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) where she is leading base building organizing in majority white communities to bring her people into working class multiracial alliances and pull them away from the Right and white supremacy. She is from a working-class family in rural Eastern Kentucky and she has over 15 years of experience in grassroots community organizing and leadership development. She is deeply committed to liberatory organizing strategies to build a multiracial poor-working class people’s movement in Appalachia and the American South. She lives in Lexington, KY with her partner Andrew, their faithful dog Sandy, and their defiant cat Tadpole.

JM Wong (they/them) is a queer child of the Chinese diaspora living on Duwamish lands (Seattle) via Malaysia/Singapore and many cities in between. They write about bodily movements, desire, and longings across distances and bordered spaces. They hope their writing exists not solely to interpret or philosophize the world, but as a contribution to changing it.

Lina Srivastava is a strategist, advocate, producer, and founder of the Center for Transformational Change, a social enterprise that applies narrative strategies to cultivate community power and build just futures. Lina has collaborated with civil society organizations and international NGOs and has worked on social engagement strategy for award-winning film, media, and art projects. She has taught in the SVA Masters of Design for Social Innovation Program, has been a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellow, a Rockwood Institute/JustFilms Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and is a graduate of New York University School of Law. Lina’s writing has appeared in venues such as TIME, Ms. Magazine, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. She is the co-producer and moderator of The New Humanitarian’s Power Shift podcast.

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.

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.

Malkia Devich Cyril is a writer, public speaker and award winning activist on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation and collective grief; and is the founding and former executive director of MediaJustice — a national hub boldly advancing racial justice, rights and dignity in a digital age. After more than 20 years of media justice leadership, Devich-Cyril now serves as a Senior Fellow at both Media Justice and at Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity.

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.

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.

Mick Moran is a queer, nonbinary, white, fat, disabled artist and radical full-spectrum doula living in unceded Lenape territory (Brooklyn, NY). They have self-published more than a dozen zines on topics such as self-advocacy, disability, body size, gender, and end-of-life. Mick is the co-creator of My Choice Always, in All Ways: A Zine about Abortion for Trans and Nonbinary Folks and the editor of DIY Doula: Self-Care for Before, During, and After Your Abortion.

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Mick has taught workshops on reproductive justice, creating screen-reader accessible zines, and media activism, and their comics have been published in Comics for Choice and Narratively. A 2024 Emerge Fellow with the Longmore Institute on Disability, they are a “disability doula” for people navigating the complex systems and feelings that come with a change in ability.

Mordecai Cohen Ettinger dreams big and has dedicated their life for the last thirty (something) years to building the world we all deserve. Mordecai is Founding Director of Health Justice Commons, the Senior Development Advisor of Sins Invalid, and has served as Senior Adjunct Lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies since 2014. They teach neurobiology and consciousness and the brain courses. Mordecai’s research spans environmental health, to the Medical Industrial Complex, to the neurobiology of the social nervous system, and its implications with regard to historical trauma, healing, resilience, collective liberation and creating just, sustainable futures.

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.

Nancy Netherland is a California-based Medicaid policy and caregiver engagement specialist with more than 15 years of experience advancing family-centered systems in Medi-Cal, child health, and community care. She is a Senior Specialist with Family Voices of California (FVCA) and was recently elected Chair of the California Medicaid Children’s Health Advisory Panel (MCHAP). She is also a parent to two former foster children with complex, rare, and special health care needs, bringing lived caregiver expertise alongside professional experience in program implementation, stakeholder engagement, and translating policy into practice to center children and families in health system design.

Raised in Davao, Philippines, Naro Alonzo is a tagahabi, or psychosocial accompaniment for a collective offering ginhawa (wellbeing) and care support to social justice defenders and communities struggling against human rights violations, extractivism, and colonization. A clinical psychologist-in-training in the University of the Philippines, they practice as a decolonial, trauma-informed, human rights-based psychosocial security specialist focusing on victim-survivors of political repression. Naro’s writings (poetry/fiction) have been anthologized in Danas (Gantala Press), Busilak: New LGBTQ Poetry from the Philippines, and Tingle: Anthology of Lesbian Writing.

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.

Nicky Tettamanti is a social epidemiologist, healthcare reform strategist, and organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work asks how collective power can transform an extractive healthcare industry into one that genuinely serves people. Drawing on public health, economics, and lived experience, she moves across academia, philanthropy, and labor to advance affordable healthcare initiatives that improve health outcomes.

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.

Olga Lucia Torres (she/her) has been sick her entire life: starting with severe asthma, a pituitary adenoma, later developing lupus and multiple other autoimmune diseases, and ultimately experiencing a devastating brain injury that left her disabled. Olga was a founding attorney of the Bronx Defenders. After recovering from the brain injury, she pivoted to patient advocacy, serving as the inaugural Northeast Region Advocacy Chair for the Lupus Foundation of America. She is a member of the Patient Engagement Collaborative, on the medical advisory board of Hear Your Song, teaches in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, chairs the Multicultural Media & Correspondents Association Board of Trustees,  and is the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ treasurer. Olga’s articles have appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, Parents, Next Avenue, and other publications.

Panthea Lee is a strategist, curator, facilitator, and mediator working for structural justice and collective liberation. She builds and supports coalitions of community leaders, artists, healers, activists, and institutions to win dignity and joy for all. Panthea currently serves as the Executive Director of Reboot, and as a fellow at the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab and at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and Imagination. She is a pioneer in guiding diverse coalitions to tackle complex social challenges, with experience doing so in over 30 countries with partners including UNDP, CIVICUS, Wikimedia, MacArthur Foundation, the City of New York, as well as civil society groups and governments from local to federal.

Raquel Villagra is a New York-based lawyer working to address the economic harms of systemic discrimination by fighting predatory financial practices and advocating for institutions rooted in cooperation, equity, and sustainability. She provides legal aid to low-income people on financial justice issues, litigates cases targeting harmful corporate and government practices that impact thousands, and organizes groups across New York to push for transformational policies, centering marginalized communities. In law school, she was co-editor-in-chief of the N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change, a publication for social change-oriented scholarship; a Helaine Barnett Fellow with Legal Services Corporation; and a student advocate defending children in juvenile delinquency cases.

Rona Fernandez is a writer and sustainable housing, racial and environmental justice activist who was born and raised and still lives on the unceded territory of the Lisjan people in the East Bay area, California. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Masters Review, The Rumpus, Yes! Magazine, Greater Good Magazine, and What God Is Honored Here? An Anthology on Miscarriage and Infant Loss—the first collection of writings by Native women and women of color on this topic. 

Rosemary “Rockie” Rivera started her career in the movement as a directly impacted volunteer. Growing up as a New YoRican in the system, Rosemary experienced first hand the injustices within multiple systems. In 2005 joined Citizen Action where she learned of systemic oppression and how it works. Rosemary began as the community organizer and in 2019 became the Co-Executive Director of Citizen Action of New York and the Public Policy and Education Fund. She serves on several boards and is the state chair of the Alliance for Quality Education.

I’m the queer eldest child of Arab immigrants, a brown girl in the South, a reproductive justice & abortion access organizer out of Catholic school. My whole life, people have wanted to say I don’t belong. But I believe it’s our sacred duty to create spaces where belonging and truth-telling coexist.

Shannon Cumberbatch is the founder and facilitator of Uproot.ed, programming committed to uprooting oppression through education and action. She has several years of experience in managerial leadership, establishing equitable policies and practices, and transforming organizational culture across institutions. Shannon also has experience creating comprehensive training curricula as an educator, and advocating for marginalized people ensnared in oppressive legal systems as a public defense attorney. Shannon’s approach to anti-oppression work is primarily informed by her own lived experience as a Black woman directly harmed by institutional and interpersonal acts of oppression, as well as her study of critical race theory, radical Black feminist/womanist tradition, teachings of grassroots community organizers, disability justice advocates, PIC abolitionists and transformative justice practitioners.

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.

Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for 20 years.

In their career, Sol Garcia Jones has focused on creating learning and healing spaces around identity, social justice, leadership, and education. She is currently the national director of curriculum and instruction at the Surge Institute, a leadership development accelerator for BIPOC education leaders.

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.

Tiffany became a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner because of her own experiences with loved ones who had not received the healing they hoped for when using Western Medicine alone. Since obtaining her acupuncture license she has provided and advocated for equitable access to TCM and other modalities. She believes that all healing practices should be affordable and equally accessible to all people in order to ensure our own good health and that of our society. In her day to day life, she enjoys nerding out over nature, the universe, speculative/science fiction, camping and writing.

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.

Trevor Smith is a writer, researcher, and strategist focused on topics such as racial inequality, wealth inequality, reparations, and narrative change. He is currently the Director of Narrative Change at Liberation Ventures, a field builder fueling the movement for Black-led racial repair, where he is building the Reparations Narrative Lab (RNL). The RNL is a first-of-its-kind creative space designed to build narrative power behind reparations. He is also the creator, curator, and editor of a newsletter titled Reparations Daily (ish).

Vinay Krishnan is a writer, organizer, and attorney living in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Barren Magazine, The Forge, SLAM Magazine, and elsewhere.

Vinay is the National Field Organizer for the Center for Popular Democracy, where he works to combat the overdose epidemic, achieve global vaccine equity, and create a universal healthcare system in America.

Warinda Johnson is an organizer with Central Texas Interfaith (CTI), a non-partisan, multi-issue coalition of congregations, schools, worker organizations, public health clinics, and non-profits that work together to address issues affecting the wellbeing of families and neighborhoods. Drawing upon 20+ years’ experience of interviewing, investigation, and storytelling, Warinda identifies, develops, and promotes community leaders, training them to share and shape their stories and build connection with others in order to implement public action. Warinda’s most recent work includes coordination of CTI’s partnership with Austin Parks & Recreation and Austin Independent School District to explore equitable access to Austin’s green spaces.

ZACH NORRIS is the former executive director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and has worked for over two decades advancing racial, economic, and gender justice in California through changes to the criminal legal system. As the California Climate Director at Greenpeace, he still fights for a world where people aren’t treated as disposable. Norris also co-founded Restore Oakland, an advocacy and training center empowering Bay Area community members to transform local economic and justice systems. He is also the co-founder of Justice for Families, which works to end youth incarceration.

Zoë Gamell Brown is descended from Dawn Cleopatra Felicity Grace Gamell Brown, Shirley Haynes, Louisa Correia, and Nganga Pattie Lawrence. Gamell carries Boviander ancestral knowledge of river and ritual care from Essequibo and Pomeroon to Wapato Island. She is an East Coast-born, Gulf Coast-raised storyteller and steward of zinkisi bibichi, a meditation and medicine monastery. Their work weaves somatic contemplation and regenerative interdependence. 

Gamell was born into the Nichiren Daishonin Buddhist tradition, and honors her ancestral Obeah wisdom. Over a decade into sobriety, they bring a deep commitment to protecting intergenerational Earth stories and healing practices. Gamell offers spacetime for ancestral wisdom and creative sovereignty to be centered through zinkisi bibichi, their work with Wapato Island Farm, and their ecological and emotional rematriation scholarship. Her understanding of matriarchy is grounded in eros, reciprocity, and devotion to Earth as mentor, teacher, and kin.

Gamell is a University of Oregon PhD Candidate, Ecotrust Madrona Fellow for Food Systems Leaders, and a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Loka Institute’s Preparing Religious Environmental Plans inaugural cohort. They are honored to have received support from the Seeding Justice Lilla Jewel Award, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Sovereignty 360, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Portland All-Nations Canoe Family, Kalliopeia, Ecowomanist Circle, Ahimsa Collective, National Education for Women’s Leadership, and more.