Sa Whitley

is an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies in the ASU School of Social Transformation and co-director of Queer X Humanities. They hold a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and an A.B. in English from Princeton University. Whitley’s research projects explore black and LGBTQ housing-justice movements, queer financial subjectivities, and the politics of black urban land reclamation and architectural preservation. Their first book manuscript is entitled The Collective Come-Up: Black Queer Placemaking in Subprime Baltimore. Their recent scholarly writing is available or forthcoming in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography. Their research has been generously supported by the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and the ASU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Whitley is also an award-winning poet and contributor to the literary arts. They are the winner of the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the runner up for both the 2024 Ninth Letter Literary Contest and the 2024 Palette Poetry Previously Published Poem Prize. Their recent poems appear in POETRY Magazine and several others are forthcoming in Paperbag and the aforementioned literary journals. Whitley is currently a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow and a former Poetry & the Senses Fellow with the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (2023-24).

Aaron Mallory

is an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Mallory is a black queer feminist who studies knowledge production, loss, and black queer health. As a black geographer, they research how Black queer communities understand loss as a site from which to challenge processes that write them out of histories, health knowledges, and geographies. Mallory works to bring Black queer hidden or missing experiences into mainstream conversations. Mallory is currently working on two projects. The first project is a queer of color critique of Public Health in particular response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Their second project looks at the ways loss is a key feature of Black life that allows communities to fight back against systemic forms of marginalization.

Sarah Keeton

is an auntie, truth-teller, lover & Black feminist scholar, currently studying at Arizona State University in the Gender Studies doctoral program. Their research explores how trauma (historical, intergenerational and otherwise) is mediated by blackness, transness, & queerness, specifically in relation to those who identify and/or are identified as femme, nonbinary, and woman. Sarah is a storyteller, autoethnographer & bricoleur seeking to honor, hold space, & sit in the ick of the dark and painful realities of existing with conquistador-settlers on stolen land. Grounded by an ethic of abundant love, Sarah explores how healing is made possible in relation, in re-narration towards a hopeful, pleasurable future we all deserve. 

Aja St. Germaine

(they), Anishinaabe, is a second-year Gender Studies Ph.D. student in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Their current research focuses on trans of color critique and applications of queer methodology in Native archives. St. Germaine is also the essays editor at Honey Literary, a 501(c)(3) BIPOC women, queer, and femme literary arts organization. They received their B.A. in Critical Studies of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where they copyedited Post-Indian Aesthetics: Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty (Barker & Jacobs, Arizona Press, 2022). Their recent writing appears in New Delta Review and Pleiades Magazine. St. Germaine joins the 2025 Black Trans Futurities symposium planning committee with a transtemporal approach to kinship in the fields of Black and Native studies, theorizing collective futures of resistance and relationality in the collective interrogation of settler-colonial restrictions of racialized gender norms.

  • "A trans/coalitional approach "recognizes the messy, overlapping, and uncomfortable ways that dominant forms of power - most importantly antiblackness . . . function in a myriad of lives"

    Trans/coalitional love-politics draws primarily on the work of seminal black feminists Cathy Cohen (1997) and Jennifer C. Nash (2013) to think through how transgender studies, in its efforts to work toward racialized gender justice, might center black gender, specifically black femininity, as it is continuously rendered fungible in trans-focused institutional formations (Chaudhry, 532-533).

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