Raquel Willis is a Black transgender activist, writer, and media strategist dedicated to elevating the dignity of marginalized people, particularly Black transgender people. Throughout her career, Raquel has held impactful positions like Director of Communications for The Ms. Foundation, executive editor of Out magazine and a national organizer for Transgender Law Center (TLC).

In 2018, she founded Black Trans Circles, a project of TLC, focused on developing the leadership of Black trans women in the South and Midwest by creating healing justice spaces to work through oppression-based trauma and incubating community organizing efforts to address anti-trans murder and violence. During her time at Out, she published the Trans Obituaries Project to highlight the epidemic of violence against trans women of color and developed a community-sourced 13-point framework to end the epidemic. This project won a GLAAD Media Award.

Meg Elison is a Philip K. Dick and Locus award winning author, as well as a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Otherwise awards finalist. A prolific short story writer and essayist, Elison has been published in Slate, McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. 

Meg Elison is a Philip K. Dick and Locus award winning author, as well as a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Otherwise awards finalist. A prolific short story writer and essayist, Elison has been published in Slate, McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. 

dave ring is a queer writer of speculative fiction living in Washington, DC. He is the author of The Hidden Ones (2021, Rebel Satori Press) and numerous short stories. He is also the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press, a co-editor of Baffling Magazine, and a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow. Find him online at www.dave-ring.com or @slickhop on Twitter.

photo credit: Farrah Skeiky

Jacqueline Goldfinger (she/they) is currently the Chair of the 2022 LMDA International Performing Arts Conference. They will be the Visiting Professor of Theatre at Indiana University in the 2022-23 academic year. They are the author of the books, Playwriting with Purpose: A Guide and Workbook for New Playwrights and Writing Adaptations and Translations for the Stage both published by Routledge. Their plays include Babel which was a LAMBDA Lit Award finalist, on the Kilroy’s list, and winner of the Generations Award and Smith Prize. They’ve also written the play Bottle Fly which won the Yale Prize and the stage adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door. Their work has been produced around the world by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, BBC 3 Radio (UK), Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Gate Theatre (New Zealand), among others. Their new opera, Alice Tierney, will world premiere at Oberlin Opera in 2023. www.jacquelinegoldfinger.com

Mai Tran is a genderqueer Vietnamese American writer based in New York. She was a winner of Epiphany Zine’s 2020 Breakout 8 Writers Prize and her work has appeared in Apogee, Vox, i-D, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She currently serves as a nonfiction coordinator for MFA App Review and is a 2021 Poetry Coalition Fellow with Lambda Literary.

Mark Oshiro is the award-winning author of the young adult books Anger is a Gift and Each of Us a Desert, as well as their middle grade books The Insiders and You Only Live Once, David Bravo. They are also the co-author with Rick Riordan of the upcoming Percy Jackson spinoff novel centered on Nico di Angelo and Will Solace. When not writing, they are trying to pet every dog in the world.

Marianne Kirby writes about bodies both real and imagined. She authored Dust Bath Revival and its sequel Hogtown Market; she co-authored Lessons from the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body. Her short fiction and nonfiction appear in numerous outlets. Find her online at www.mariannekirby.com or @TheRotund everywhere else.

Chencia C. Higgins is just a girl from Texas who has made it her mission to create stories in which sassy, southern Black women are loved out loud. In 2019 she won a Romance Slam Jam Emma award for her debut paranormal romance, Janine: His True Alpha. When she isn’t hunkered down in her writing cave, Chencia can be found with her nose in a book, saving recipes on Pinterest for things she’ll never make, and dreaming about traveling even further south for the winter.

Danny Lore is a queer Black writer and editor raised in Harlem and currently based in the Bronx. They’ve had their short fiction published by FIYAH, Podcastle, Fireside, Nightlight, EFNIKS.com and more. They’re also included in A PHOENIX FIRST MUST BURN (Viking Children’s, 2020) and Janelle Monae’s THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN (Harper Voyager, 2022). They’ve written the comics QUEEN OF BAD DREAMS (Vault, 2019), QUARTER KILLER (Comixology, 2020), and most recently LUNAR ROOM (Vault, 2021). Their next creator-owned project is the middle-grade graphic novel KICKS (Scholastic, 2024) to be illustrated by Seth S. Smith.