Shye Sales is a spoken word artist, poet, writer, and host who has performed across the East Coast. She facilitates a writing workshop for LGBT youth and young adults called The HealLink Circle, encouraging her students to ‘write through the pain.’ She has appeared on BlogTalkRadio and co-chairs Djeli Writing Ministry, the writing ministry of UFC NewArk; performed at Mo Beasley’s UrbanErotika and Stoney Mae Production’s Waiting All My Life Marriage Equality Concert. Shye currently hosts Crack the Mic, co-hosts LPJ’s Friday Night Jam. She won Fresh Fruit Festival’s Award of Distinction for Performance Poetry.

Lolan Buhain Sevilla (pronouns: they/them/their) is a queer butch cultural worker & organizer who strives to root their art in community, study and practice. They have over a decade of cross-sectoral nonprofit Administrative, Development, Event Coordination, and Programmatic experience.  Lolan currently works at the New York City Anti-Violence Project as the Training Coordinator, serves as Co-chair on the Board of Directors for CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, and is a member of the National Writers Union, Local 1981. They co-founded Kreatibo, a Bay Area-based queer Pin@y Artist Collective, and have been published in Maganda Magazine, The Womanist Journal, Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women, and TAYO Literary Magazine.Their first chapbook, Translating New Brown, is a collection of poetry and short stories that won the Philippine American Writers & Artists’ Calatagan Award.  Lolan is also co-editor of Walang Hiya …Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice, and was awarded a 2012 Writing Residency at Hedgebrook.

Marty Correia writes fiction and poetry in the East Village where she has lived with conceptual artist Kate Conroy for twenty years. Marty’s work has appeared in several publications including The Mailer Review, FUSE, Punk Soul Poet, Lady Business and Fiction Fix. She ran the Wicked Queer Authors literary series at Dixon Place and the Grammarians Toast Paul Violi memorial event. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New York Department of Cultural Affairs funded Marty to produce the A Tribe Called Butch reading series. Artists who have most influenced Marty are James Baldwin, Agnes Martin, Led Zeppelin, José Saramago and Gitta Sereny. A graduate of NYU’s creative writing MFA program, Marty recently finished Brickbat, a novel set in Bridgeport, CT and Coney Island, NY that spans from the days of P.T. Barnum to 1986.

Afua Kafi-Akua has worked as a museum professional, media producer, media professor and distribution executive for two decades at many cutting edge independent media companies including Women Make Movies, The Cinema Guild, Antenna Audio and Third World Newsreel. She is currently a distribution consultant and board member at Third World Newsreel.She is also the senior manager of the Uris Center for Education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an adjunct professor in the Communications department at The College of New Rochelle’s DC37, Tribeca campus.  She holds an M.A. degree in Media Studies from The New School and a B.S. in psychology from Howard University. Afua has been a poet, writer, musician and media artist for over 30 years.