Contributors

Rachel Cargle is an Akron, Ohio born writer, entrepreneur and philanthropic innovation. Her work and upcoming book with Penguin Random House, centers the reimagining of womanhood, solidarity and self and how we are in relationship with ourselves and one another. In 2018 she founded The Loveland Foundation, Inc., a non-profit offering free therapy to Black women and girls.   Her umbrella company, The Loveland Group houses a collection of Rachel’s social ventures including The Great Unlearn, a self-paced, donation-based learning community, The Great Unlearn for Young Learners – an online learning space for young folks launching in 2022, and Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre – an innovative literacy space designed to amplify, celebrate and honor the work of writers who are often excluded from traditional cultural, social and academic canons. Rachel is a regular contributor to Cultured magazine, Atmos magazine and The Cut, and has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker. Rachel lives & loves in Brooklyn, New York.

Ana Castillo, Ph.D. has penned more than two dozen titles to date in a range of genres. She is credited as a pioneer of Chicana/x, feminist works with a career that spans nearly half a century. Among her credits: Forthcoming works: Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home: Stories (HarperVia; May, 2023); Isabel 2121 (novel) Harpervia; May 2024. Most recent publication: MY BOOK OF THE DEAD (Poems); UNMP, Fall, 2021. Among her accolades: Coming up March 2022, Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. Recipient of PEN Oakland Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring BLACK DOVE: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me. 2018: MALCS (Mujeres Activistas en Letras y Cambios Social Institute)” Xicana Critical Thought Leader Award.” In 2020 Dr. Castillo was the recipient of the Northeastern Illinois University Distinguished Alumnus Award, the highest alumni honor the University bestows. It recognizes a particular achievement of note, a series of such achievements or a career of outstanding accomplishment. Twice Lambda award recipient in fiction and non-fiction. Among best seller titles: novels include So Far From God, The Guardians and Peel My Love like an Onion, among other poetry: I Ask the Impossible. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been profiled and interviewed on National Public Radio and the History Channel and was a radio-essayist with NPR in Chicago. Ana Castillo is editor of La Tolteca 2.0 on her blog, an arts and literary zine, which features creatives of all backgrounds, while focusing on the marginalized. Ana Castillo (June 15, 1953-) is a celebrated and distinguished poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. Castillo was born and raised in Chicago. She has contributed to periodicals and on-line venues (Salon and Oxygen) and national magazines, including More and the Sunday New York Times. Castillo’s writings have been the subject of numerous scholarly investigations and publications. In 2014 Dr. Castillo has held the Lund-Gil Endowed Chair at Dominican University, River Forest, IL and served on the faculty with Bread Loaf Summer Program (Middlebury College) in 2015 and 2016. She also held the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University 2001-06, The Martin Luther King, Jr Distinguished Visiting Scholar post at M.I.T. and was the Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College in Utah in 2012, among other teaching posts throughout her extensive career. Ana Castillo holds an M.A from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D., University of Bremen, Germany in American Studies and an honorary doctorate from Colby College. She received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters.

Veronica Chambers is a prolific author, best known for her critically acclaimed memoir, Mama's Girl which has been course adopted by hundreds of high schools and colleges throughout the country. The New Yorker called Mama's Girl, "a troubling testament to grit and mother love… one of the finest and most evenhanded in the genre in recent years." Born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn, her work often reflects her Afro-Latina heritage. She coauthored the award-winning memoir Yes Chef with chef Marcus Samuelsson as well as Samuelsson’s young adult memoir Make It Messy, and has collaborated on four New York Times bestsellers, most recently 32 Yolks, which she cowrote with chef Eric Ripert. She has been a senior editor at the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and Glamour. Born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn, she writes often about her Afro-Latina heritage. She speaks, reads, and writes Spanish, but she is truly fluent in Spanglish. She is currently a JSK Knight fellow at Stanford University.

Juju Chang is a multiple Emmy Award-winning co-anchor of ABC News’ “Nightline.” She also reports regularly for “Good Morning America” and “20/20.” Chang’s decades of reporting converged in two hour-long prime time specials in 2021. She co-anchored an ABC News Live special “Stop The Hate: The Rise In Violence Against Asian Americans.” And after the mass shooting at three Asian-themed spas, Chang co-anchored and reported from the scene for an “ABC News 20/20” breaking news special “Murder In Atlanta”, which won a Front Page award in 2022.   Chang has been recognized for her in-depth personal narratives set against the backdrop of pressing national and international news: from natural disasters to terrorism and racial equity. Her long-form storytelling includes a critical examination of the controversial “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy, told through the eyes of one pregnant woman and her family among the 60,000 asylum seekers camped for months along the Rio Grande. Chang’s award-winning report “Trans and Targeted” on violence against transgender women of color across the country caps a series of her stories on LGBTQ+ issues. Chang won a GLAAD award for her story about Matthew Shepard’s murder and the legacy his parents built in his honor.   Chang has covered major breaking news for decades for ABC News including extensive coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic: the science, the economic fallout, the racial disparities, the impact on hospital ICUs and essential workers.   Chang has covered mass shootings and the myriad issues raised by shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, at the concert in Las Vegas and at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Conn.   She’s reported on global climate issues including a trip through Guatemala examining the “dry corridor” impact on climate refugees profiling a desperate farming family faced with the stark choice of starvation or migration. Chang has consistently covered gender-based violence through Central Africa on the front lines against Boko Haram and #bringbackourgirls. She traveled to Honduras for “Femicide: the Untold War,” an eye-opening look at rampant violence against women.   Chang has profiled newsmakers like Joe Biden and Oprah Winfrey as well as high-profile celebrities including Jamie Lynn Spears, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Her extensive feature reporting covers mental illness, opioid addictions and parenting dilemmas.   A former news anchor for “Good Morning America,” Chang joined ABC News just after college as an entry-level desk assistant in 1987 and rose to become a producer for “World News Tonight.” After reporting for KGO-TV in San Francisco and the ABC News affiliate service NewsOne in Washington, she co-anchored the overnight show “World News Now.” Chang’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, including multiple Emmys, Gracies, a DuPont, a Murrow and Peabody Awards.   Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Northern California, Chang graduated with honors from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in political science and communication. She is married to WNET president and CEO Neal Shapiro and, together, they have three sons. Chang is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a founding board member of the Korean American Community Foundation.

Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Farai Chideya grew up with family from all walks of life and opinions — military, art school, educators, and civil servants. Every Thanksgiving after dinner, her family would hotly debate the issues of the day – from abortion, to transgender rights, to the Vietnam War – and then move on to dessert. That’s Farai's American side. Her paternal Zimbabwean side, which she first visited at age four and then in adulthood over the past two decades, gave her an increasingly rich perspective on race, culture, politics and economics from an African diasporic and trans-Atlantic perspective. Today, Farai works both behind the scenes and in public forums on questions of media equity — meaning, the ways in which media can serve rural and urban Americans; people of all races and national backgrounds, and gender — for the health of civil society. Her most recent book, The Episodic Career, is about how we must be psychologically self-employed (including being aware of dynamic shifts in our workplaces, industries and economy) in order to pivot, grow, earn and thrive. On camera and on the air, she talks on a variety of broadcast outlets about politics, demographics and cultural analysis. I also write my own data- and reporting-rich stories. Farai previously served as a Program Officer focusing on journalism with the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression team before launching an independent radio show and podcast, Our Body Politic in 2020. The show centers how Black women and other women of color shape news and politics.

Emma Cline is the author of The Girls, the story collection Daddy, and The Guest. The Girls was an international bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Critic's Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. The winner of the Plimpton Prize, Cline was also named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2021, she won an O. Henry Prize for “White Noise.” Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Granta and The Best American Short Stories.

Naima Coster is the author of What’s Mine and Yours, an instant New York Times bestseller, as well as a Read with Jenna and Book of the Month Club pick. Her debut, Halsey Street, was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was recommended as a must-read by People, Essence, BitchMedia, Well-Read Black Girl, The Skimm and the Brooklyn Public Library among others. Naima’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, Elle, Time, Kweli, The Paris Review Daily, The Cut, The Sunday Times, Catapult and elsewhere. In 2020, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Naima has taught writing for over a decade in community settings, youth programs, and universities. She is currently affiliate faculty in the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in L.A. Naima tweets as @zafatista and writes the newsletter, Bloom How You Must.  She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer whose inspirations include Diego Rivera and Goya’s The Disasters of War. She is the author of Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which was a NY Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. Her memoir, Drawing Blood, received global praise and attention. Her animated films have been nominated for three Emmys, and won an Edward R. Murrow Award.  Crabapple’s reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. She was the 2019 artist-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2019, a New America fellow in 2020, and the winner of the Bernhardt Labor Journalism Award in 2022. She was also a Puffin Fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project in 2022. Currently, she is a fellow at Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, working on a history of the Jewish Labor Bund. She got her start as a journalist sketching the frontlines of Occupy Wall Street, before covering, with words and art, Lebanese snipers, labor struggles in Abu Dhabi, Guantanamo Bay, the US border, America prisoners, Greek refugee camps, and the ravages of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. She once confronted Donald Trump in Dubai about exploitation of the workers building his golf courses. As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated explainer journalism, collaborating with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Jay Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and The ACLU. Her animations are on permanent display at The Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.  She has spoken to audiences around the world, from Jakarta to Beirut, Sao Paolo to Ramallah, Mumbai to Paris, at universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and The London School of Economics, and at museums including The Brooklyn Museum and The Guggenheim.  Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, and the New York Historical Society.

After a long career in the music industry, Robyn Crawford is now focused on mental and physical wellness and writing. She lives in New Jersey with her wife and children.

Tiffany D. Cross most recently hosted The Cross Connection on MSNBC. She is the author of Say It Louder: Black Voters, White Narratives, and Saving Our Democracy (Amistad/HarperCollins) and previously served as a Resident Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (Spring 2020). Her broad experience across media, politics, and policy includes more than two decades of navigating newsrooms and campaigns while engaging different constituencies on the ground. She is a former DC Bureau Chief of BET News and cut her teeth in media at CNN where she worked as an Associate Producer covering Capitol Hill for the network’s weekend show unit. She also previously served as a Field Producer for America’s Most Wanted and Discovery Communications. No stranger to the campaign trail, Tiffany not only covered campaigns but worked on them as well. She has lent her expertise to numerous local, state, and federal candidates as well as issue campaigns across the country. Serving as a senior advisor to one of the country’s largest labor organizations, one of Tiffany’s many tentacles was organizing all communities of color on both a local and national level. Using her media background, Tiffany has helped shape the narrative around issues, individuals, and ideologies. Leaving the campaign stump, Tiffany transitioned from the control room to the green room when she co-founded The Beat DC, a national platform intersecting politics, policy, business, media, and people of color. With a readership comprising influencers across the country, Tiffany led a team that made the fast moving current affairs in a busy legislative climate digestible for the political connoisseur and novice alike.  Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Tiffany left at a young age and moved to Atlanta, Georgia. She attended Clark Atlanta University where she studied Mass Communications with an emphasis on radio, TV, and film. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Judith Curr is President and Publisher of the HarperOne Group, which was formed in 2018 when Judith joined HarperCollins. It represents a broad and diverse publishing landscape, bringing together four imprints, each with their own unique editorial vision: HarperOne, Amistad, HarperCollins Español, and HarperVia. Publishing books that appeal to readers across cultures, nations, languages and racial divides, the overall mission of HarperOne Group is to “publish for the world we want to live in.” Prior to joining HarperCollins, Curr founded Atria Books in 2002, overseeing its growth into a consistently successful and forward-thinking division. A native of Australia, Curr has been an executive in American publishing since 1996.

Ayesha Curry is a renowned restaurateur, chef, 2x New York Times bestselling author, producer, host, entrepreneur and was featured on the prestigious Forbes “30 Under 30” list. Her accessible approach to cooking has made her one of the most sought-after experts in food and lifestyle. Ayesha is the Founder and CEO of Sweet July, her burgeoning lifestyle brand with a focus to uplift an inclusive and eclectic array of creators through the products sold and stories shared.   In 2019 Ayesha launched Sweet July, a quarterly lifestyle magazine that covers a range of topics such as wellness, fashion, fitness, beauty, entrepreneurism and food. Following the launch of the magazine, Ayesha opened a brick-and-mortar Sweet July storefront and café in Oakland, CA and its accompanying website, featuring thoughtfully created products alongside other carefully selected items from Black-owned and female-founded companies.   In 2020, Ayesha launched Sweet July Productions, which focuses on creating content centered around food, family, faith and female empowerment. In 2022, Ayesha announced Sweet July Books in partnership with Zando. Sweet July Books will acquire fiction and nonfiction work, with a focus on diverse authors and women’s stories.   In 2023, Ayesha launched Sweet July Skin, a new skincare line featuring clean, simple and effective products inspired by Ayesha’s Jamaican heritage. Ayesha, along with her husband Stephen, is the co-founder of Eat. Learn. Play., an organization dedicated to unleashing the potential of every child and making a positive impact for generations to come.

Abi Daré is the author of The Girl with the Louding Voice, which was a New York Times bestseller, a #ReadWithJenna Today Show book club pick, and an Indie Next Pick. She grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and went on to study law at the University of Wolverhampton and has an MSc in International Project Management from Glasgow Caledonian University as well as an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Abi lives in Essex, UK with her husband and two daughters, who inspired her to write her debut novel. (Photo Credit: Gazmadu)

Cazzie David is the creator, writer, and star of the critically acclaimed web series Eighty-Sixed. She is a columnist at Graydon Carter’s Air Mail and has written for Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Reporter, Glamour, InStyle and Vogue. She is also the author of the New York Times Bestselling memoir No One Asked for This (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Photo Credit: Katie Mccurdy

The Poets & Writers 2019 Editor of the Year, Dawn Davis is the founding publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. She has edited many prize-winning and New York Times bestselling books, including Pulitzer Prize winners, Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo and The Known World by Edward P. Jones, the National Book Critics Circle award winning How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair, and the National Book Award finalist, Never Caught by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. In 2020, Davis was named Editor in Chief of the Condé Nast magazines, Bon Appétit and Epicurious. She returned to Simon & Schuster in 2023. Prior to first joining Simon & Schuster, Davis was publisher of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, where she edited The Known World by Edward P. Jones, which won the Pulitzer Prize; Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, which was one of the best-selling books of the decade; and The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner.