About the Contributors

Dr. Jaime Cantrell is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Arts, Communication, Media, and English at Texas A&M University Texarkana, where she established the undergraduate minor program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She’s been awarded library and research grants from Cornell University, Duke University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Cantrell is the author of essays and reviews appearing in Feminist Formations, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Study the South, the Journal of Homosexuality, This Book is An Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics (UIP Press, 2015), The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk (UNC Press, 2017), and The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South (2022). In 2015, she co-edited Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, published by the Queer Politics and Cultures series at SUNY Press. With a foreword by Ann Cvetkovich, Out of the Closet, Into the Archives was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best LGBT Anthology in 2016. From 2014-2018, she served on the National Women’s Studies Association Governing Council, and she currently serves as Vice-President of the South Central Modern Language Association.

Destiny Crockett (she/her) is a scholar-artist originally from St. Louis, Mo. She studies African American girlhood in the 20th and 21st centuries, Black feminisms, class, 20th and 21st century African American women’s literature and visual culture, Black archive theories, and Black queer studies. She is the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Childhood Studies and Racial Justice at Rutgers University Camden, where she is working on her first academic monograph. She has published in Visual Arts Research, Resources for American Literary Study, and Girlhood Museum. She has poetry forthcoming in Women's Studies Quarterly and A Gathering Together. Her poetic practice has been supported by Black Feminist Plait/Form through RAGE Lab at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. in English from Princeton University.

Tina Escaja is a writer, digital artist, and Distinguished Professor of Spanish and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont. As a literary critic, she has published extensively on gender and contemporary Latin American and Spanish poetry and technology. Considered a pioneer in Electronic Literature in Spanish, Escaja’s creative work transcends the traditional book format, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality and multimedia projects exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Escaja’s poems, fiction, and digital work have appeared in numerous collections and have been translated into multiple languages. She is a full member of the American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE) and a corresponding member of the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE). Some of her digital and literary works can be experienced at www.tinaescaja.com.

Catherine A. Evans is a doctoral candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on queer feminist life and activism in 20th and 21st-century American literature and culture.

Mahdiyeh Govah is a PhD student in the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at SUNY University at Buffalo. Her research explores themes of survival, resistance, and affective solidarity in the Middle East, with a focus on social movements, culture, and the cultural production emerging from the region.

Ildikó Kalapács grew up in socialist Hungary in the 70s, where she studied visual art and folk dance.  She came to the US in 1987 and continued her visual art studies at EWU (Eastern Washington University). She does not separate her two main fields of art: folklore and visual art. She has researched, performed, and taught folk dance in the US, Hungary, and Romania. In Spokane, WA, where she lives, she leads the Erdély Folk Dance Ensemble with her husband, Wayne Kraft. She has received two Puffin Foundation grants for art projects and has exhibited in group and solo shows in the US, Europe, and Japan. The Spokane YWCA commissioned her to create the bronze sculpture “Refuge” in 2015.

Alexis Krasilovsky was born in Alaska, survived sexual assault at gunpoint, and knows what it’s like to be completely deaf. She is Professor Emerita of Screenwriting at California State University, Northridge. Her book, Watermelon Linguistics: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the 2022 International Book Awards, and she contributed to Reclamation: A Survivors Anthology and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence. She is also the filmmaker of the global feature documentaries, "Women Behind the Camera" and "Let Them Eat Cake."  See https://alexiskrasilovsky.com.

Soo Young Lee (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Social Work at the University of Chicago. Guided by an Asian American and Women of Color feminist praxis, her work engages critical storytelling methods to explore experiences and meanings of political awakening, identity, and solidarity with Asian Americans and other young people of color. Through these explorations at the intersections of race, gender, place, and beyond, she seeks to illuminate sites of possibility within young people’s social contexts to develop their critical consciousness while tending to their well-being. Her work is indelibly shaped by her experiences of (critical) care in organizing and other community spaces and as a transnational Korean daughter and granddaughter.

Vuyokazi Ngemntu (she/them) is a writer-performer situated in Cape Town, South Africa, whose praxis uses poetry, song, physical theatre, storytelling, and ritual to navigate epigenetic trauma and center Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the creation of new black imaginaries. Her short story, “Binnegoed,” was selected as the overall winner of Ibua Journal’s 2022 “Bold: Food” regional. More recently, her short story, “Blood and Ballots,” made the Year's Best African Speculative Fiction Vol. 3. Her work has appeared in World Literature Today, The Kalahari Review, Herri, Ibua Journal, Short.Sharp.Stories, New Contrast, Ake Review, Pepper Coast Lit, The Culture Review, and elsewhere.

Jessie B. Ramey, Ph.D., is the Director of the Women’s Institute and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at Chatham University. www.JessieBRamey.com.

Judy Rohrer is a scholar-activist who has previously written about whiteness, racial politics, and settler colonialism for academic and popular audiences. She is currently the director of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Eastern Washington University. You can visit her personal website at judyrohrer.strikingly.com.

Avik Sarkar investigates the aesthetics, erotics, and politics of transsexual life. Avik has presented her work at Lancaster University, the Hunter Museum of American Art, and the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA. She received a research fellowship from Visual AIDS for an archival project to be published in 2025; her writing is also forthcoming in Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Avik graduated with distinction in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale, where her thesis was supported by an LGBT Studies Research Award. She is currently pursuing her master’s at Oxford, fully funded by the Clarendon Scholarship.

Sheila Shankar (she/her) is a therapist and social work PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. Sheila’s research, teaching, and social work practice are rooted in intersectional feminist and transformative justice principles. She uses creative and qualitative research methods to examine how people experience, resist, and heal under conditions of gender-based and state violence. Sheila is a member of the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network and uses psychodynamic and somatic approaches to promote healing justice.