Educator, producer, and screenwriter Jim Nikas is founder and Director of the privately held Posada Art Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving and promoting the legacies of Mexican artists José Guadalupe Posada and Manuel Manilla, mainly in the United States but internationally as practicable. Since 2003, Nikas has loaned and curated works from the Foundation’s collection at dozens of venues, including: Stanford University, East Los Angeles College, Museum of Latin American Art, The Mexican Museum, the International Print Center, Mexican Consulates, and the San Francisco Art Institute, to name a few. Beginning in 2019, the Posada Art Foundation formed a joint venture between the Catalina Island Museum and Landau Traveling Exhibitions, establishing an ongoing touring exhibition of Posada’s works. Nikas has lectured in the US and in Mexico on various aspects of the art, from Day of the Dead to the influence of José Guadalupe Posada on today's social-movement imagery. Together with film director Victor Mancilla, Nikas co-produced the first major English-language documentary film about José Guadalupe Posada, Searching for Posada—ART and Revolutions (2014) and is co-screenwriter for the documentary The Needle and the Thread (in post-production by Eravision Films) about the life of Franciscan nun María de Jesús de Ágreda. Nikas is a former member of the Advisory Board of the Documentary Film Institute Board at San Francisco State University and served on the board of directors of the Coro Hispano de San Francisco. He divides his time between San Francisco, CA and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Jackie Cruz is a Licensed Real Estate Salesperson in New York and New Jersey, currently working with The Corcoran Group. Also a Licensed Hairdresser and Cosmetologist, Cruz ran her own beauty salon in New York City for over two decades. She traveled the world extensively as the personal family stylist of Canadian singer Paul Anka; as stylist to Charlene Nederlander, owner of the Nederlander Theater; and as stylist to Regina Resnik, known for The Threepenny Opera. A graduate of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and of The Yoga Brooklyn Academy, Cruz is a Certified Health Coach and Certified Yoga Teacher who volunteers as a Cancer Coach for the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, NY. Cruz is a native of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she and her family have been lifelong members of the Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church. The proud mother of two sons, she lives in the neighborhood with her mother and her husband. Cruz’s dedication to helping change the lives of those around her includes sharing her experience and providing support for hysterectomy and breast-cancer survivors via her website Pink Ribbons Talk at pinkribbonstalk.com.

Dr. Robert (Roberto) David Ogden is Associate Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Texas State University in San Marcos, where he has lived since 1981. Originally from Dallas, Texas, he spent most of his professional life in the mathematical and computational sciences, working as a professor and programmer. In the 1970s, he took a year leave from DePaul University to teach physics at Rafael Cancel Miranda High School, a private school organized mainly by Puerto Ricans frustrated with the Chicago public school system. Dr. Ogden also spent years working in Mexico at la Unidad de Ciencias Marinas in Ensenada, Baja California. After rejoining the Episcopal Church of his teen years, he served in Hispanic ministry at St. Mark’s in San Marcos, TX. Dr. Ogden is licensed as a Lay Minister, Lector, and Catechist in the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas, and he has online credentials to officiate at marriages. Since retirement, Dr. Ogden has played in a rock band, worked on his writing, and spent time with nieces and nephews—and now their children. In their old age, he and Rosie, his wife of 38 years, spend quality time caring for one another. They have two daughters, Miletus and Martha.

Dr. Kenneth N. Ngwa is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew University. He holds a ThM (2000) and a PhD (2005) from Princeton Theological Seminary, and BA and MDiv (1995) degrees from the Yaoundé Faculty of Protestant Theology in Cameroon. Dr. Ngwa’s teaching and scholarship combine biblical exegesis, postcolonial and cultural approaches to the Hebrew Bible, with particular interest in identity construction, memory, reception theory, and narrative ethics. He teaches introductory and advanced courses on the Hebrew Bible, as well as on “Africana Studies and Religion.” Dr. Ngwa is an ordained minister with the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon; the Director of the Religion and Global Health Forum (RGHF) at Drew Theological School; a co-chair of the African Biblical Hermeneutics session of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL); and a board member of the African Renaissance Ambassador Corp, a non-profit organization providing medical, financial (micro loans), and educational support to rural communities, women, and young people in Cameroon. His several essays and articles include “Did Job Suffer for Nothing? The Ethics of Piety, Presumption and the Reception of Disaster in the Prologue of Job” (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 2009) and “The Making of Gershom’s Story: A Cameroonian Postwar Hermeneutics Reading of Exodus 2” (Journal of Biblical Literature, 2015). He is the author of The Hermeneutics of the ‘Happy’ Ending in Job 42:7–17 (De Gruyter, 2005) and has co-edited: Navigating African Biblical Hermeneutics: Trends and Themes from Our Pots and Our Calabashes (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018); World Christianity, Urbanization and Identity (Fortress Press, 2021); Africana Studies and Religion: Critical Explorations (Fordham Press, 2021); and Preparing for Parts Unknown: Global Health, International Travel and Missions (Global Health Catalyst, 2021). Dr. Ngwa is currently working on a book-long project on Exodus, titled Let My People Live: Towards an Africana Reading of Exodus (Westminster John Knox Press).

Rev. Dr. Moses O. Biney is Associate Professor of Religion and Society and African Diaspora Studies at New York Theological Seminary, where was formerly Research Director for the Center for the Study and Practice of Urban Religion (CSPUR). He holds BA and DipEd degrees from Ghana’s University of Cape Coast; an MPhil from University of Ghana; and ThM and PhD degrees in Social Ethics from Princeton Theological Seminary. Rev. Dr. Biney is an ordained Presbyterian Minister of Word and Sacrament, with several years of pastoral experience, and currently serves as pastor of Bethel Presbyterian Reformed Church in Brooklyn, New York. His research and teaching interests include the religions of Africa and the African Diaspora, religion and transnationalism, religion and culture, urban ministry, and congregational studies. Rev. Dr. Biney is Moderator of the Conference of Ghanaian Presbyterian Churches in North America and a member of the editorial board of the World Christianity Journal. He has published several essays on the religious practices and institutions of African immigrants in North America, transnational religious networks, urban religion and West African spirituality, including: “Building and Expanding Communities: African Immigrant Congregations and the Challenge of Diversity" (2013); “Ghanaian Presbyterians in the United America: Why Some Join American Denominations and Others Don’t” (2015); “Transnational Religious Networks: From Africa to America and back to Africa” (2015); “African Christianity and Transnational Religious Networks: From Africa to America and back to Africa” (2016); and "Spirituality From the Margins: West African Spirituality and Aesthetics” (2019). Rev. Dr. Biney is the author of From Africa to America: Religion and Adaptation among Ghanaian Immigrants in New York (New York University Press, 2011), and his co-edited book World Christianity, Urbanization and Identity is forthcoming from Fortress Press.

Dr. Raimundo César Barreto, Jr. is an associate professor of World Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary. He earned a PhD in Religion and Society from Princeton Theological Seminary and holds degrees from McAfee School of Theology/Mercer University and Seminário Teológico Batista do Norte do Brasil. He has taught at the Northeastern Baptist Seminary and at Faculdade Batista Brasileira in Brazil, and also served as Director of Freedom and Justice at the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). He remains involved in ecumenical and interfaith work, contributing in various capacities to the American Baptist Churches USA, the Baptist World Alliance, the National Council of Churches USA, and the World Council of Churches. Dr. Barreto is the general editor of the World Christianity and Public Religion book series (Fortress Press) and one of the conveners of the Princeton Theological Seminary's World Christianity Conference. He has co-edited five books and contributed dozens of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. His monograph “Evangélicos e Pobreza no Brasil: Encontros e Respostas Éticas” (São Paulo: Editora Recriar/Editora Unida, 2019) will be published in English by Baylor University Press with the title “Protestantism and Poverty in Brazil: Face-to-Face Encounters and Ethical Responses” (Spring 2023). He is finalizing another monograph, “Base Ecumenism: A Latin American Decolonial Contribution to Ecumenical Praxis and Theology” (Fortress Press, Summer 2023). His impending work also includes the forthcoming book Christians in the City of São Paulo: The Shaping of World Christianity in a Brazilian Megacity (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2024).

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her novel Dominicana is the inaugural book pick for GMA book club and chosen as the 2019/2020 Wordup Uptown Reads. It was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, The Aspen Words Literary Prize, a RUSA Notable book, and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee, and is the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies, including the Lighthouse Fellowship, Siena Art Institute, and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Fellowship. She has published shorter works in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning literary journal Aster(ix). Cruz is an Associate professor at University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches in the MFA program and splits her time between Pittsburgh. New York, and Turin.

Kianny N. Antigua is a fiction writer, poet and translator who hails from the Dominican Republic. She works as a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at Dartmouth College and as a freelance translator and adapter for Pepsqually VO & Sound Design, Inc. Antigua has published 22 children's literature books, four short stories, two books of poetry, an anthology, a book of micro-fiction, a novel and a magazine. She has won 16 literary awards, and her writings appear in various anthologies, textbooks, magazines, and other media. Some of her stories have also been translated into English, French, and Italian.

Stephen G. Adubato studied Spanish Literature and Religious Studies at Fordham University and went on to pursue graduate work in Moral Theology at Seton Hall. Since then, he has taught philosophy and theology at both the secondary and university levels. He is currently spending a year working as a Journalism Fellow for Compact Magazine through the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He is a contributing writer for the National Catholic Reporter and has published with over forty other publications, including Newsweek, The New York Daily News, The Tablet, America: The Jesuit Review, Nylon, and The Hedgehog Review. He also hosts the Cracks in Postmodernity blog and podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @stephengadubato.

Dr. Michael Anthony DeAnda, a queer Tejano scholar-practitioner from El Paso, TX, is a professional lecturer in Game Design at DePaul University. He researches the intersections of games, queerness, and culture, considering the intimacies between LGBTQ and Latinaxo lived experiences and games. Using game design as research praxis, he develops games that draw comment on privileged structures, using intersectionality, queerness, and feminism as critical lenses. He earned a PhD in Technology and Humanities from Illinois Institute of Technology. Dr. DeAnda has published in Technical Communications Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Culture, The Video Game Art Reader, Queer Studies in Media, and Popular Culture and Widerscreens.

Taylor Alexis Baker is a writer from Harlem and an MFA student at City College- CUNY. She holds an Interdisciplinary SB in Digital Art/Creative Writing from The CUNY Graduate Center and an AAS in Animation from Kingsborough Community College. She wishes to pick apart Harlem with a mindful eye and through a Black woman’s ideology. An avid learner who considers herself part of the Christian faith, Baker is also an educator of all grades. Her hobbies include reading, digital art, and entrepreneurship.

Sharon Lee De La Cruz is a multi-disciplinary artist and activist from New York City. Her thought-provoking pieces address a range of issues related to tech, social justice, sexuality, and race. De La Cruz’s work ranges from comics, graffiti, and public-art murals to more recent explorations in interactive sculptures, animation, and coding. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union and an MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. De La Cruz is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Processing Foundation Fellowship and a Tin House Summer Workshop participant. She lives in New York City.

Dr. Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba and grew up in New York. She holds a BA from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, and MA and PhD degrees in Anthropology from Princeton University. As a cultural anthropologist, poet, writer for young people, teacher, and public speaker, Dr. Behar is known for the compassion she brings to her quest to understand the depth of the human experience. She has lived in Spain and Mexico, and returns often to Cuba to build bridges around culture, literature, and Jewish life. In her career as a cultural anthropologist, she has written books about her travels—Translated Woman, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy—and is also the author of a bilingual book of poetry, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé. More recently, Dr. Behar has begun writing books for young people, and she won the Pura Belpré Author Medal for her debut middle-grade novel, Lucky Broken Girl. Her new middle-grade novel, Letters from Cuba, a Sydney Taylor Notable Book, is based on her grandmother’s escape from Poland to start a new life in Cuba on the eve of WWII. Her debut picture book, Tía Fortuna’s New Home, is forthcoming in 2022. Dr. Behar was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and has been named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. She has recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Marta Lucía Vargas is a poet and a teacher. She is a founding member and senior editor of Aster(ix) Journal, a literary transnational feminist arts journal, and co-founder of WILL: Women in Literature in Letters. Currently, she serves as Managing and Content Editor for HTI Open Plaza, an online platform within the Hispanic Theological Initiative. Her poetry and creative nonfiction works have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023), The Lake Rises: poems to and for our bodies of water (Stockport Flats, 2013), and the chapbook For the Crowns of Your Head (Poets for Ayiti, 2010). Vargas has taught writing and literature at Hunter College and at New York Institute of Technology. She was the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for the Montclair Art Museum and serves as Poet-in-Residence for Bloomfield High School's What's Your Story program. Vargas holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and allocates her time with her family in South Orange, New Jersey, and New York City. 

Radhiyah Ayobami is Brooklyn-born with Southern roots. She holds a B.A. in Africana Studies from Brooklyn College, an MFA in Prose from Mills College, and has received awards from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and a residency with the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has been published in several anthologies and journals, including AGNI, Apogee, Aster(ix), and Tayo Literary Magazine. Some of her most enjoyable work has been facilitating workshops with pregnant teens, inmates, and elders. Her free time is spent listening to plants, going to her son's basketball games, and working on her first novel. Ayobami self-published her first book, the long amen (2019).

Natalia Treviño is an immigrant from Mexico and the author of the poetry collections, VirginX (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014). She is a Professor of English and an affiliate Mexican American Studies faculty member at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, Texas. She has won several awards for her writing including the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, and the Menada Literary Award at the Ditet e Naimit Poetry Festival in Macedonia. Recently, Lavando La Dirty Laundry was translated to Albanian and Macedonian and published in a dual-language edition in Macedonia through their National Ministry of Culture. Natalia graduated from The University of Texas at San Antonio with an MA in English and from the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s MFA program. Her publications appear in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Mirrors Beneath the Earth (Curbstone Press), Bordersenses, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, The Taos Journal of Poetry and Art, and several other journals and anthologies.

Rev. Dr. Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. A cultural anthropologist, he specializes in work and ethnographic writing dealing with undocumented Central American migrants and the Salvadoran diaspora. He has published numerous articles, chapters in collections, and written major works in theology and culture, including ten collections of poetry. His most recent collections of poetry, all published by Resource Publications/Wipf & Stock, are: No Room (2020), Wading in the River (2021), After Dark (2021), The Days You Bring (2022)—nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry—The Looking Glass (2023), Tell Somebody (2023), and The Place across the River (2024). Rev. Dr. Recinos’s poetry has also been featured in Anglican Theological Review, Weavings, Sojourners, Anabaptist Witness, The Arts, Afro-Hispanic Review, and Perspective, among others.

Ana Echevarria DelCorazón is the queer daughter of Puerto Rican migrants who grew up Pentecostal in North Philadelphia. She is a first-year seminary student pursuing an MDiv from United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities and hopes to pursue a PhD in theology. She also holds an MSW in clinical Social Work from the Smith College School for Social Work and an MPA from Princeton University. She and her spouse and young son currently reside in Iowa.

Dr. Elías Ortega-Aponte, a Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Leadership, is the President of Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, IL. Dr. Ortega is an interdisciplinary scholar who received his MDiv and PhD (Religion and Society, Magna Cum Laude) from Princeton Theological Seminary (2005, 2011). He also holds a B.A. in Communications Arts & Sciences and Philosophy and Religion from Calvin College. Prior to Meadville Lombard Theological School, Dr. Ortega served as Associate Professor of Social Theory and Religious Ethics at Drew University Theological School. He is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Commission on Institutional Change.

Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections one-bedroom solo (A Gathering of the Tribes / Fly by Night Press, 2011) and that’s what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Ping Pong, Rattapallax, and Callaloo, and online at Luna Luna, Hyperallergic, and Aster(ix) Journal. They have been anthologized in Brooklyn Poets Anthology, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and Me No Habla with Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She teaches English for the City University of New York. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in El Alto Manhattan.