Laura Chandra

Laura Araujo S. is a Mexican-born Chicana educator and writer living in the Inland Empire, Califas. Although her love for literature and writing has been a life-long passion, she recognizes she is a late bloomer and is eager to share the long awaited writings and art projects stirring within. Her works explore the connections that present themselves through the act of writing, body politics, borders, memory, and identity. When she is not at a workshop fixing something, creating something with her hands, or learning a new skill, then she’s with familia. Orale.

librecht baker is a writer, member of the Dembrebrah West African Drum and Dance Ensemble, in Long Beach, CA, as well as a Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices) alumnae. She has a MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. Her poetry is included in CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (MTV Books) and is forthcoming in Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Trans-Genre Press).

Celeste Chan is an experimental artist, writer, and organizer. A Lambda Literary fellow & VONA alumni, her writing can be found in Ada: Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, As/us journal, Feminist Wire, Hyphen Magazine, Matador, and the forthcoming Writing the Walls Down anthology (Trans-Genre Press). She recently received a Hedgebrook residency, a SF Writers’ Grotto fellowship, and a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant. Her films have screened in CAAMFest, Digital Desperados, Entzaubert, Frameline, Heels on Wheels, MIX NYC, National Queer Arts Festival, Queer Women of Color Film Festival, and Vancouver Queer Film Festival, among others. Alongside KB Boyce, she co-directs Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project. She has presented and curated in the SF Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Bloomington, Seoul, Glasgow, Berlin, and beyond. She lives in San Francisco.

Maya Chinchilla is an Oakland-based Guatemalan femme writer, video artist, educator and author of The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (Kórima Press, 2014). Maya writes and performs poetry that explores themes of historical memory, heartbreak, tenderness, sexuality, and alternative futures. Her work —sassy, witty, performative, and self-aware— draws on a tradition of truth-telling and poking fun at the wounds we carry. Born and raised in Long Beach, CA, by a mixed class, mixed race, immigrant activist extended family, Maya has lived and loved in the Bay Area for the second half of her life. Her work has been published in anthologies and journals including: Mujeres de Maíz, Sinister Wisdom, Americas y Latinas: A Stanford Journal of Latin American Studies, Cipactli Journal, and The Lunada Literary Anthology, and is quoted (and misquoted) in essays, presentations and books on U.S.-Central American poetics; Chicana/Latina literature; and identity, gender, and sexuality. Maya is a founding member of the performance group Las Manas, a former artist-in-residence at Galería de La Raza in San Francisco, CA; and La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, CA; and is a VONA Voices, Dos Brujas and Lambda Literary Fellow. She is the co-editor of Desde El Epicentro: An anthology of Central American Poetry and Art and is a lecturer at San Francisco State University, UC Davis and other Bay Area colleges.

Catherine Frost is a playwright from Washington, DC. She is graduating from Pomona College with a major in Africana Studies and a Theatre minor. Her work often focuses on radical personhood and sound is an important element in her art. Her favorite sitcoms are Smart Guy and Living Single.

Javier is a playwright, drag performer and producer. Javier’s performance work has been presented at colleges, clubs, theaters, and on city streets across the Southwest, on the East coast and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. His plays has been developed and presented at El Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista, Brava Theater Center in San Francisco and at AS220 in Providence, RI. His most recent show, LAST CALL was developed as part of the Teatro Lab residency in 2012. His lives with a spoiled chihuahua that keeps him company while he pursues an MFA in Playwriting at UC Riverside.