Author Bio

Najwa Juma is a Palestinian teacher, translator, writer, and activist from Gaza. She received a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature before continuing her studies in the field of education, subsequently working as a teacher for thirteen years. Najwa is a member of the General Union for Palestinian Writers. She has published two short story collections…

Gwendolyn Kirk is a linguistic anthropologist and the librarian for South and Southeast Asian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She researches language, power, and cultural production in South Asia including work on Punjabi and Urdu screen cultures of Pakistan.

Abdul Aijaz is a human geographer researching politics and poetics of the environment in South Asia. He focuses on the cultural politics of water in the Indus Basin in Pakistan. He is currently teaching in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky.

Imran Feroze is a Pakistan-based writer, poet, teacher, and activist. He researches themes of subjectivity and subjugation in modern Urdu poetry. He has taught Urdu literature at multiple institutions in Pakistan including Government College University in Lahore where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees with a roll of honor.

Medha Muskan is a poet, farmer, youth worker, and storyteller invested in questions of justice and solidarity, especially in the realms of farm & food, Brown & Queer histories, and children’s development.

မခြင်္သေ့ (Ma Chinthe) is a pen name of a diasporic Burmese writer who was born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar, under the previous authoritorian regime. They currently resides in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Ho-Chunk Peoples. (www.machinthe.com)

Ashok Kumar Pandey is a renowned Indian poet, historian, author, and social worker who specialises in the Indian freedom struggle and Kashmir. He has a deep interest in Palestine and has written many articles and produced a number of videos on the past and present of Palestine on his YouTube channel.

Refaat Alareer is a renowned Palestinian writer, poet, literary scholar, and activist, often referred to as ‘the voice of Gaza’. Alareer was one of the founders of “We Are Not Numbers” project, a Palestinian non-profit set up in 2015 that joined writers from around the world with young people in Gaza to “tell the stories…

Joy Mazahreh is an English PhD student at the University of Minnesota. She studies contemporary postcolonial theory and literatures from Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt with special attention to the works of Edward Said. Originally from Amman, Jordan, she received her BA in English from the University of Jordan and then was awarded a Fulbright grant…

Beau Beausoleil is a poet and activist based in San Francisco, California. His two most recent chapbooks are: The Killing of George Floyd (Intermittent Press, 2023) and Poems for Ukraine (Barley Books, UK, 2023). These poems also appear in the online Moving Parts Press Digital Poetry Series as Poems for George Floyd and In Ukraine: Poems. He is the founder of…

Fawad Khan is a playwright, actor, and director from Pakistan. He graduated from the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA), Karachi, majoring in direction for stage, in 2008. Since then he has been consistently doing theatre—directing, acting, assisting, writing/translating/adapting. He has acted in major productions such as KING LEAR (Dir. Zia Mohyeddin), READER by Ariel…

Amoke Kubat is a Yoruba Priestess, retired teacher, multidisciplinary artist , writer, a social weaver, and an activist. She is the author of Missing Mama: My Story of Loss, Sorrow and Healing. Amoke imagined and created YO MAMA’s Art of Mothering Workshops in 2010. This art-based practice of wellness began as a drop-in artspace for mothers…

Humera Afridi is a 2021 recipient of the Robert and Ina Caro Travel/Research Fellowship and a 2017 NYFA Gregorgy Millard Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature. She earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. Humera is a former fellow of the Asian American Writers Association and a former Fiction Fellow at The Writers Institute.…

समाजातील अल्पसंख्य, वंचित तसेच नाकारलेल्या समाजघटकांच्या जगण्यातील अगतीकता, कोंडमारा व त्यांच्याकडे पाहण्याचा समाजाचा, शासनप्रशासनाचा दृष्टीकोन याचे यथार्थ चित्रण उभे करणारा तरूण लेखक म्हणून साहिल कबीर ओळखले जातात. विद्यापीठीय अभ्यासक्रमात निवडक साहित्याचा समावेश करण्यात आलेला आहे. फॉर्मलेस, सविनय अस्वस्थ, कथागत आणि सोलोकोरस हे प्रकाशित साहित्य.

Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and a columnist. She teaches at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (University of Washington Press, 2019) and co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (UPenn Press,2018)…

Idrisa Pandit is a native Kashmiri scholar activist based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Idrisa’s teaching and research interests include anti racism, anti oppression, Islam, and the Kashmir conflict.

Heider Tun Tun (Firm Rock, in Yucatec Maya) is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History, Politics and Political Economy at Regis University. He is a first-generation Mayan scholar from Tahmek (place of the big hug), Mexico. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, and his postdoctoral studies at…

Inez Steigerwald is a teacher and librarian in Washington, D.C. She has worked with students for over 10 years. She lived in Costa Rica for a time as a child and there she came to appreciate and love Latin American language, culture, and history. She began working with her mother, Ruby, to record the oral…

Ruby Steigerwald is a mother, grandma, and teacher of English as a second (or third) language in Washington, DC. She has been working since the 1980’s for human and civil rights, especially for women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and African Americans. Ruby met the women of Co-Madres in 2005 when she traveled to El…

Sunil Shanker is a trained theatre practitioner, actor, director, and acting coach. He has worked with international artists from Germany, Sri Lanka, the UK, Italy, India, Romania, and Australia. Sunil  graduated from the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa), Karachi, Pakistan in 2009 with a major in acting. He has an innate understanding of how…

PARAKH can be translated as critical eye or mindful scrutiny. In Parakh Theatre, this scrutiny happens through a full immersion of BodySoulMind. Artists and audiences from diverse and unequal locations, languages, and journeys come together to critically engage with sociopolitical, ecological, and epistemic injustices and structures of violence that shape our lives, and in which…

The Batticaloa Justice Walk is an everyday practice of peaceful resistance. Following in the path of women from the families of the disappeared and others’ protests during and after the war, the walk moves single file, on the side of the road carrying placards with slogans, demands, wishes, poetry, curses, and statements about justice and…

Papori Bora teaches at the Centre for Women’s Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research is at the intersection of politics, sociology, history, and feminism—on the issues of political representation, citizenship, the postcolonial nation-state, politics of race, indigeneity, ethnicity, militarization, and feminist theory. Her articles have been published in journals like the International…

Wendy Lutter is a first year PhD student in the Leadership in International and Intercultural Education cohort of OLPD at UMN. Her area of research lies in the gender inequities in higher education business schools. Wendy is on the marketing faculty at Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches and…

Fatemeh Nasr Esfahani is a Ph.D. student in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. She also holds a doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Isfahan, Iran (2018). Fatemeh’s research interests include diverse aspects of humor in Iranian society, specifically the role of humor in people’s everyday lives. Her Ph.D. reseaarch project at…

Madelaine C. Cahuas is a Latina feminist geographer from Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada) studying urban politics, place-making, care work and activism with racialized migrant and Latinx communities. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota and is affiliated with Chicano & Latino Studies, American Studies, and Gender,…

Rahsaan Mahadeo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Black Studies program at Providence College. As a scholar of race, time, the human and the episteme, Rahsaan studies how time is racialized, how race is temporalized and how racialization and racism condition youth’s perspectives on time. In his forthcoming book, Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time while Young,…

Marcelo Garzo Montalvo (he/they) is a musician, danzante (ceremonial dancer), and Ethnic Studies scholar-activist. He is a first-generation Chilean-Canadian-American of Mapuche and Spanish descent. They hold a B.A., M.A. and PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley – a program founded by the 1969 Third World Liberation Front. Their teaching and research focus on…

Emily Mitamura is a poet and scholar of race, gender, and film. She is currently the Shauna M. Stark Pembroke Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at Brown University. They received their PhD in political theory at the University of Minnesota, working closely with Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Critical Race and…

Ana Cláudia São Bernardo (she, her, hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Providence College. In 2020-2021 she held the position of Zemurray-Stone postdoctoral fellow in Brazilian Studies at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She has an MA and PhD in Lusophone Literatures,…