CO-ORGANIZERS
 MOYA BAILEY is a postdoctoral scholar of Women’s Studies and Digital Humanities at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She currently curates the #transformDH Tumblr initiative in Digital Humanities. She is also the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.
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 RUHA BENJAMIN is a faculty member in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and is the author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. She writes and speaks widely on the tension between innovation and equity in the U.S. and globally, and is actively involved in initiatives to transform public engagement with science, medicine, and technology.
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 AYANA A. H. JAMIESON, Ph.D. founded the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network in 2011. She teaches courses on speculative and science fictions; mythology and modern life; and race, class, gender and leadership for the Center for Distance Learning at State University New York, Empire State College. As a lifelong resident of the Inland and San Gabriel Valleys, Ayana is currently writing a biography of Octavia E. Butler based in part on the Octavia E. Butler Archives at the Huntington library.
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GUEST SPEAKERS
 DR. REYNALDO ANDERSON currently serves as a member of the Executive Board for the Missouri Arts Council and as an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Harris-Stowe State University. Reynaldo was recognized by Gov. Jay Nixon in 2010 for his leadership in the community. Finally, Reynaldo publishes research in regard to several dimensions of the African American experience, and the African Diaspora including Afrofuturism, Rhetoric, Africana Womanism, globalization and world systems theory, and recently taught as visiting lecturer in Accra, Ghana. |
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 STEVEN BARNES is a New York Times bestselling, award-winning novelist and screenwriter. He recently won an NAACP Image Award as co-author of the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series with actor Blair Underwood and his wife, Tananarive Due. (For an overview of his 20-plus novels, visit Amazon.com.)
http://www.diamondhour.com/index.html |
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 LISA BOLEKAJA is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop and was named an Octavia E. Butler Scholar by the Carl Brandon Society in 2012. She co-hosts a popular screenwriting podcast called “Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room” (available on Itunes and Stitcher) and she’s a Staff Writer for Bitch Flicks, an online feminist film review site. Her work has appeared in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (Crossed Genres Publishing), The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 8 (Aqueduct Press), the SF/F anthology, How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens (Upper Rubber Boot Books), and Uncanny Magazine.
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 ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN, Co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a science fiction scholar, writer, artist, healer and social justice facilitator living in detroit. She’s a 2015 Clarion Sci-fi Writer’s Workshop participant, and was a 2014 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and Knight Arts Challenge winner.
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 ERIN CHRISTOVALE is a curator based in Los Angeles focusing on film/video within the African Diaspora. She graduated with a B.A. from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and her most recent exhibition, a/wake in the water:Meditations on Disaster was featured at the MoCADA Museum this past Fall. She also works with a collective of creatives called Native Thinghood promoting emerging artists of color.
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 DJ LYNNÉE DENISE is a cultural producer and independent scholar who incorporates self-directed project based research into interactive workshops, music events and public lectures that offer participants the opportunity to develop an intimate relationship with under-explored topics related to the cultural history of marginalized communities. Lynnée coined the term “DJ Scholarship” to explain DJ culture as a mix-mode research practice, both performative and subversive in its ability to shape and define social experiences, shifting the public perception of the role of a DJ from being a purveyor of party music to an archivist, cultural worker and information specialist who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, and provides access to music determined to have long-term value.
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 M. ASLI DUKAN is a director, producer, editor and media arts educator. She graduated from The City University of New York with an MFA in 1999, where she received the best editing award for her thesis film, Sleeping on a train in Motion. Her speculative fiction (SF) short films have screened at several film festivals around the country including in Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, Seattle and in New York City. She has been awarded several media grants including most recently the Leeway Art and Change grant in 2014. In 2000, she founded Mizan Media Productions where she has produced and directed several music videos, including Boot for Tamar-kali and Do You Mind for Hanifah Walidah, which debuted on LOGO TV in 2008. She is currently in post-production on her feature length documentary, Invisible Universe and in development on the feature length anthology horror film, Skin Folk based on the book by award winning SF writer, Nalo Hopkinson. She currently hosts “The Invisible Universe Vlog Series” on Youtube, which is dedicated to topics related to the history of Black speculative fiction.
http://maslidukan.com |
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 TANANARIVE DUE, an author, screenwriter and educator, is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award winner. She teaches Afrofuturism at UCLA and in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She frequently collaborates with her husband, science fiction writer Steven Barnes. Their short film, “Danger Word,” can be viewed at www.dangerword.com.
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 JOHNETTA ELZIE, born and raised in St. Louis, has been documenting the events in Ferguson on Twitter. She is Co-Editor of the #Ferguson Protester Newsletter. Her essay “When I close my eyes at night, I see people running from tear gas” was published in Ebony Magazine on September 9, 2014. Since then, Elzie has been one of the youth activist voices that has taken the message of resistance internationally to media outlets like Aljazeera.com, The Feminist Wire, the Wallstreet Journal, GlobalGrind.com and Huffingtonpost.com.
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 NETTRICE GASKINS, Ph.D. was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She majored in Visual Art at duPont Manual High School in Louisville, KY. She earned a BFA in Computer Graphics with Honors from Pratt Institute in 1992 and a MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. She worked for several years in K-12 and post-secondary education, community media and technology before enrolling at Georgia Tech where she received a doctorate in Digital Media in 2014. Her model for ‘techno-vernacular creativity’ is an area of practice that investigates the characteristics of this production and its application in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics). When she is not advancing interdisciplinary education, Ms. Gaskins blogs for Art21, the producer of the Peabody award-winning PBS series, Art in the Twenty-First Century and publishes articles and essays about topics such as Afrofuturism and Ghost Nature. Her essay was included in Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader published by ETC Press.
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 AMIR GEORGE is a motion picture artist and film programmer born and bred in Chicago. Amir creates work for the cinema, installation, and live performance. His motion picture work and curated programs have been screened in festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. In addition to founding the Cinema Culture, a grassroots film advocacy organization Amir is co-curator of Black Radical Imagination, a touring experimental short film program.
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 ANDREA HAIRSTON is author of Lonely Stardust, a collection of essays and plays and novels: Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the Tiptree Award and Carl Brandon Kindred Award, and Mindscape shortlisted for the Phillip K Dick and Tiptree Awards, and winner of the Carl Brandon Award. Her latest play Thunderbird at the Next World Theatre, appears in Geek Theater. In her spare time Andrea is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College and the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre.
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 NALO HOPKINSON, born in Jamaica, is a Jamaican-Canadian whose tap roots extend to Trinidad and Guyana. She has published numerous books and short stories and occasionally edits anthologies. Her writing has received the John W. Campbell Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Sunburst Award (twice), and the Norton Award. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. Her short story collection “FallinginLove With Hominids” will appear from Tachyon Books in 2015.
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 WALIDAH IMARISHA is an author, educator, organizer and poet. She is the author of the collection of poetry Scars/Stars, and the upcoming nonfiction book Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption. She is also one of the co-editors of the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. She has taught in the Portland State University’s Black Studies Department and Oregon State University’s Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department.
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 JOHN JENNINGS is an Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo-State University of New York. He is the co-author of the graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture, Vol. 1 and the art collection Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture (both with Damian Duffy). Jennings is also the co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem, MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco, and the AstroBlackness colloquium in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Jennings’ current comics projects include the Hiphop adventure comic Kid Code: Channel Zero, the supernatural crime noir story Blue Hand Mojo, and the upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred.
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 DENNIS LEROY KANGALEE is a poet and guerrilla filmmaker and is best known for his 2002 cult film “As an Act of Protest.” Personal, political, and transgressive, his work often deals with radically sensitive characters who are overwhelmed by their personal circumstances and the world at large.
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 TAJA LINDLEY and JESSICA VALORIS of Colored Girls Hustle LLC have made a funkyfresh-sistergirl-rap-duo out of their friendship spanning over a decade. Combining ‘90’s flavor with afrofuturist ideologies and crunk bravado, this rap duo comes together to share what’s going on in the world, explore how it impacts their lives and communities, and to imagine new possibilities.
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 SORAYA JEAN-LOUS McELROY is a Haitian born, Harlem and Brooklyn raised mixed media queer womynist artist currently living and loving in New Orleans. Her love of black womyn and families, motherhood, nature, Afrofuturism, comics/graphic novels and the African Diaspora are central themes in her work. Soraya is the co-founder of Wildseeds: New Orleans Octavia Butler Emergent Strategy Collective. Wildseeds work, steeped in Black feminist traditions of survival and healing, engages Octavia Butler and other speculative/sci-fi and fantastical authors a resource for social change. Soraya is constantly imagining and creating new work and was awarded the Alternate Roots Visual Scholars grant in 2014. Most recently Soraya was the creative facilitator, curator and contributing artist for Wildseeds “Sacred Space”at ExhibitBE and co-organizer of Black Futures Fest: A Celebration of the Black Fantastic in New Orleans 2015.
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 DERAY MCKESSON has been documenting the events of Ferguson via twitter (@deray) and is the Founder and Co-Editor of the Ferguson Protestor Newsletter. He is an activist, organizer, and educator focusing primarily on issues impacting children, youth, and families. He previously worked for the Harlem Children’s Zone and TNTP, opened an academic enrichment center in West Baltimore, and with Baltimore City Public Schools leading systemic human capital change.
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 ALONDRA NELSON is Dean of Social Science and Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where she is also appointed in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is the author of the award-winning book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History; Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life; and “Afrofuturism,” a special issue of Social Text. Her latest book, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, will be published in January.
www.alondranelson.com |
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 NNEDI OKORAFOR is a novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism for both children and adults. Born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents, Nnedi is known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. She is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Buffalo.
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DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER is the author of Half-Resurrection Blues (book one of the Bone Street Rumba series) and Shadowshaper. His first collection of short stories, Salsa Nocturna and the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, which he co-edited, are available from Crossed Genres. You can find Daniel’s thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decade-long career as an NYC paramedic and hear his music at ghoststar.net/ and @djolder on twitter and youtube. |
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 BRITTANY N. PACKNETT, 30, is North St. Louis County native and serves as Executive Director of Teach For America – St. Louis, which serves 20,000 low-income students across the region. She has been leveraging her privilege to amplify the voice of students and young people in Ferguson- the true leaders of this work- carrying their message to multiple national and international media outlets, facilitating the #FergusonFireside Conference Calls with America, serving as a supporting editor of the #Ferguson protestor newsletter, engaging students in critically conscious leadership development, and helping lead Teach For Ferguson during school closings due to early unrest in the region. She previously taught 3rd Grade in Southeast Washington, DC, and worked in federal education policy and advocacy for low-income students of color around the nation. Brittany was recently appointed to the Ferguson Commission and to President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She was named by TIME Magazine as one of 12 New Faces of Black Leadership in January 2015.
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 Haitian born, American raised, NUMA PERRIER is an actress, writer, producer, and visual artist. As Co-Founder of Black&Sexy TV, she nurtures projects from script to screen.
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 RASHEEDAH PHILLIPS is a public interest attorney, mother, and writer living and working in Philadelphia. She is the creator of The AfroFuturist Affair, one of the founding members of Metropolarity Spec Fic Collective, and a 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange. She has independently published a collection of short, speculative stories called Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), and an anthology of visionary essays called Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice.
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 DOROTHY ROBERTS is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School. She is also Director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society, and author of Killing the Black Body, Shattered Bonds, and Fatal Invention. |
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 SOFIA SAMATAR is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria and winner of the John W. Campbell Award, the Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. She co-edits the online journal Interfictions and teaches literature at California State University Channel Islands.
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 NISI SHAWL is coauthor of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (2005), a founder of the Carl Brandon Society, and a longtime member of Clarion West’s Board of Directors. Her 2008 story collection Filter House won the Tiptree Award. She edits book reviews for Aqueduct Press’s literary quarterly The Cascadia Subduction Zone. Shawl edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars (2013) and WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity (2011). She co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2013) and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany (2015). Her Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is due out from Tor in Spring 2016.
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 BE STEADWELL is a singer songwriter from Washington DC. With roots in jazz, acapella and folk-Be composes a soulful blend of genres into what she calls “queerpop”. In her live performances, she utilizes loop pedal vocal layering and beat boxing to compose her songs on stage.
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