Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, author, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective, and ecological healing. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.

nicholas b jacobsen is an artist and educator with a focus on their experience of home as a settler in the United States. They were raised in Nuwu lands occupied by St. George, UT and currently live on Isleta Pueblo lands occupied by Albuquerque, NM. jacobsen’s work is an effort to reckon with and heal their generational relationship to the places they know as home and an invitation for others to do the same. You can see more of their work at nicholasbjacobsen.com.

Cú McCann (he/him) is a white trans person of Irish and Southern Italian descent, a big old homo, and an Instructor in the Doyle family style of bataireacht, aka Irish stick fighting. Cú teaches through his school, Strange Fox Fighting Arts, in classes that center trans and queer people but welcome all who fight by our side. He studies under Bernie Leddy, head of the Doyle system worldwide, and honors his ancestors with the anti-colonial agenda he maintains in the tradition. More at http://strangefoxfightingarts.com

Caroline Picker (poetry) and Leah Jo Carnine (visual art) are long time dear friends and comrades with a shared commitment to creating art and ancestral reconnection as part of working towards a more just world. They have organized for social and racial justice together for over fifteen years, including serving on the SURJ board together for the past six years, and are both queer parents. Caroline is a poet and movement worker living in Southern Vermont on Abenaki land. Leah Jo is an artist and physician assistant providing harm-reduction based primary care on Kalapuya lands in Eugene, Oregon.

Dr. Alicia Wargo is an educator, facilitator, social justice scholar, and leadership coach. She has two decades of experience facilitating learning experiences for adults in educational and organizational contexts. Much of her work as a facilitator focuses on creating spaces where individuals can share their lived experiences to engage in intra- and cross-racial conversations about race and identity to effect systems change. This learning always happens through the deepening of relationships: one’s relationship with self, with other workshop participants, and with Alicia as the facilitator.

Alicia received her Ph.D. in Leadership and Change from Antioch University and holds an M.Ed. from Bank Street College of Education. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Embracing the Both/And: Learning from the Lived Experiences of White Facilitators of Racial Equity Work,” offers examples of the complexity of occupying a White racial identity while working to challenge systemic inequities. Since publishing her dissertation, Alicia has integrated principles of Relational-Cultural Theory into her work as a scholar-practitioner, focused on the role of power in the possibility of forming growth-fostering relationships needed to impact social change.

Dr. Wargo’s research explores the work that those with dominant identities, particularly those racialized as White, must engage in to embody the humility required for multi-racial coalition building needed to meet this moment. She engages this work with an open heart, creating space for authentic connection, reflection, and opportunities to collectively co-create a course forward.

Pamela Nath lives in New Orleans where she loves being surrounded by multiple bodies of water, by massive Oak trees, pelicans, and egrets, and by people who work passionately for a better world and who strive to create Beloved Community with one another. She has a Ph.D. in Counseling and Developmental Psychology from the University of Notre Dame, works as a licensed psychologist and an Undoing Racism Trainer/Organizer with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond.

Orissa Arend is a mediator, free-lance journalist, and psychotherapist in New Orleans. She is author of Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers take a stand in New Orleans. She is a pillar with a justice-seeking coalition called Justice and Beyond and a long time ally of the Peoples’ Institute for Survival and Beyond. She is involved in a church -based project for reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, and aftermath. This is an attempt to begin an amends process for the complicity of her church – Episcopal – socially, theologically, and politically in the egregious sin of believing in white supremacy.

Frank Gargione is a mission-driven strategic communicator and storyteller who partners with equity-focused nonprofits after pivoting from a career in fashion. He has a master’s degree in Sustainability and Social Impact in Business from IE New York College where his thesis involved memes and fair representation for their creators. His writing and designs have appeared in WWD, GQ, Nylon, Nonprofit Quarterly, WUSSY, Proximate, and within the Likemind and Curbed networks. A first generation Italian-American, he lives at the Jersey Shore with his partner and their three rescue dogs.

Maren Cadwallender creates poems and collages working to transmute narratives of conquest & capital gain, linear progression and upward mobility, and to reveal the humans, bodies, lands, living beings, relationships, and lived realities of a European diaspora folded into white, settler identity. Maren is a white settler born in Australia, where their Dad migrated with his family as a toddler from England, and raised in Virginia where their Mom’s family has lived since the 1600s. They now live in New York where they are an Indigenous solidarity organizer informed by years of landcare work and training in politicized somatics.

Beth Howard is the author of Song For a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity From a Coal Miner's Daughter from Haymarket Books and she is the Cultural Strategist for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. She has organized in the American South for two decades. She is based in Lexington, Kentucky.

Lynn Burnett is the creator of CrossCulturalSolidarity.com, The White Antiracist Ancestry Project, and Tracking this authoritarian moment, and the resistance to it.

Kate Davis Jones is a collaborative writer (a.k.a. ghostwriter) in Durham, NC. She writes Recurrent Concussion on Substack. Find all her work at katedavisjones.com.

Erika Bernabei (she/they, queer, white) supports leaders, organizations and collaboratives to build internal infrastructure and culture for sustainable, racially equitable systems. Erika is a member and co-founder of Equity and Results, a 10 year old multiracial worker-owned cooperative that partners with groups to strategically disrupt normative practices and replace them with strategies that address the root causes of the problem. Erika uses an impact-driven methodology with embedded racial equity principles - Racial Equity-Centered Results-Based Accountability (RE RBA) - locally and nationally to plan and operationalize new ways of being.

Prior to E&R, Erika worked at PolicyLink for nearly a decade, co-leading the development of the Promise Neighborhoods Institute to support more than 50 place-based partnerships use results driven infrastructure, and as an Assistant Commissioner in the New York City Department of Homeless Services. She has a MA in Education Policy from Teachers College, Columbia University and a PhD in Educational Leadership from New York University. Erika lives in New York with her partner and dog, and is a local immigrant community activist.

Norma Smith, poet, memoirist, essayist, social researcher, and educator, was born in Detroit and grew up in California’s Central Valley. She has worked as a hospital clerk, union shop steward, journalist, translator-interpreter, and events and conference organizer. She has been active in many social change movements, always with an anti-racist and anti-oppression lens.

Smith holds a BA in creative writing, an MA in Education with special focus on equity issues, and a PhD in Ethnic & Cultural Studies. She was the founding director of The Edge of Each Other’s Battles Project, an organization that promoted participation of grassroots community scholars in academic conferences.

Her writing has appeared in literary, scholarly, and political journals. Her book of poems, HOME REMEDY, is available at https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/home-remedy/

Norma is currently working as a freelance editor and organizer of in-person and online writing workshops. Please see normasmithwriter.com for more about Norma Smith and for samples of her work.

Patricia Maher (she,they) is a Sagittarius who has multiple passions. She is a lesbian from the old days and for the past 20+ years has been engaged in anti-racist organizing in many ways: as a trainer/organizer with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, as an organizer with white people through European Dissent NYC, and with Deepening Humanity in Homeopathy. Pat is also a homeopath and an avid lover all beings in nature, and has been an astrologer for 50 years, with a deep commitment to healing and transformation.

Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist. Raised by both the swamps of Pomouik and Lumbee lands in eastern Carolina and the Hérault river of Languedoc, France, they are a sixth-generation settler currently residing on unceded Cherokee territory (colonially known as Asheville, North Carolina). As a writer, teacher, and facilitator, their work orbits entanglement, queer ecologies, belonging, and what it means to be in relationship with a land settled by their ancestors. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Center for Humans and Nature, Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.

Geneva Toland is a writer, songleader, naturalist and educator living in the juniper-piñon pine foothills of the La Plata mountains, homelands of the Ute, Diné, and Puebloan peoples. Her debut poetry collection, Council of Thunder, is the winner of Wayfarer Book's 2025 Homebound Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Reckoning, Camas, and humana obscura, among others. She is a poetry editor at Terrain Magazine and received her MFA in Poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. See her offerings at www.genevatoland.com.

alexandra "ahlay" blakely (she/her) is a descendant of Scandinavian and Ashkenazi folk, with roots in the Baltic archipelagos of Sweden, the Arctic coast of Norway's Vesterålen islands, the borderlands of Central Europe, and the British Isles. Born on the West Coast as the first generation of her family after generations rooted in Brooklyn, she later spent eleven years living between the mountains of Chiapas, Tepoztlán, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico, where she was shaped by traditions of intergenerational kinship, mutual care, and the animate world. She lives and creates on Coast Salish lands while benefiting from the ongoing harms of colonization and the displacement of the Muckleshoot and Duwamish Peoples. Some local movements to support Indigenous sovereignty are Real Rent Duwamish, Protectors of the Salish Sea & Canoe Journey Herbalists to name a few. https://www.realrentduwamish.org/ https://www.instagram.com/protectors.salish.sea/?hl=en https://www.canoejourneyherbalists.org/