is a scholar of women, gender, and sexuality studies with a focus on radical political formations, anti-black racism, trans theorizing, and philosophy. Weil completed their Ph.D. in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Their work appears in Social Text, Critical Inquiry, The Black Scholar, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities.

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice and affiliated faculty in Black Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at UIC. As an abolitionist, their work focuses on the range of ways that trans and gender nonconforming people are policed and surveilled in society, the experiences and consequences of that policing and surveillance, and strategies that folks use to resist state-sanctioned violence. He also teaches courses on Borders and Occupation, and Feminist Sports Studies with the Prison Neighborhood Arts and Education Project (PNAP), and is board member with the Transformative Justice Law Project (TJLP).

is a Director of Student Success at Michigan State University focused on closing opportunity gaps, particularly for Black students, through identity consciousness. Her research areas include intersectionality, hyper/in/visibility politics, pedagogy, epistemic oppression/resistance, Black ecologies, and critical-cultural communication.

investigates the aesthetics, erotics, and politics of transsexual life. Avik has presented her work at Lancaster University, Hunter Museum of American Art, and 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, funded by the Clarendon Scholarship.

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UNC Asheville. Their academic writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals like GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and PUBLIC: A Journal of Imagining America, as well as edited volume chapters in Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis and Unsafe Words: Queer Perspectives on Consent in the #MeToo Era. They have also written extensively in the public sphere, particularly about movements to disarm campus police and confronting trans antagonism in the university.

(she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College. She is a writer and artist working in the expanded field of feminist poetics as it intersects with diasporic articulations of gender and race across the mediums of film, performance, and literature. She earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in English with certificates in Cinema and Media Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. From 2022-2023 she was a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Studies Program.

is an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona studying Gender & Women’s Studies and Political Science. He is also a member of the University of Arizona’s Trans Studies Research Cluster. He works in fields of trans studies, pedagogies, and history.

(they/he) is a Black queer nonbinary Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, interdisciplinary scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. They are the winner of the Betty Stuart Smith Award from the University of Illinois Chicago, where they recently received their PhD in English with concentrations in Black Studies and Gender & Women's Studies. He received an MFA from Northern Michigan University and he was a Quarterfinalist in the 5th Annual Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship, often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest. He spends much of his free time gaming and he plays a mean hand of spades. They recently served as the 2024 Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Wave Magazine to curate a folio of creative writing and art focused on the video game genre, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter Journal, wildness, Scalawag, Four Way Review, Obsidian, and the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living, among others. You can find him on Instagram at @deziree.the.writer. 

is a historian of Black politics, gender, sexuality, and labor in the 20th century United States. Before joining the African American Studies faculty at Wake Forest, Eshe was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at UVA. Dr. Sherley received a B.A. in African American Studies from Yale University and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan with a concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies.

(they/them) is a Black, queer, gender-infinite parent, poet, teacher, and cultural studies scholar. Their poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies and their critical writing, including the essay “Dear Trans Studies, Can You Do Love?,” has appeared in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Families in Society. Ian-Khara is a Cave Canem fellow, recipient of the New Millennium Award for Poetry, and finalist for the National Poetry Series 2024 competition. Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and now southern Maine, where they teach Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana at Bates College.

is a doctoral candidate whose work considers how lived Black experiences of gender, scripted within crises contexts, reflect material iterations of transness. Originating from the Deep South, Jaz is a UK videographer, writer, and poet. Their research has earned support from the UC Consortium for Black Studies, Yale University's Institute for Social and Policy Studies, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Black Sexualities. The results of their communal archival work are showcased in public art projects like Philadelphia's “Finally on 13th,” the city's only Black ballroom mural, and traveling installations such as The Colored Girls Museum’s “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Their scholarly work is currently featured in "Antipode: A Critical Journal of Geography" and they have a forthcoming piece exploring the translocation of Black girlhood in "differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies."

(they) is a rootworker, educator, and PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago. Their research spans an array of fields, including trans* and queer studies, Indigenous studies, Black feminist thought, and Black ecologies. Their dissertation project, “Black Transfeminist Ecologies: A Litany of Loose Objects”, explores the ecological as an interstitial site of black, trans*, and indigenous speculation, reworking the conditions of relationality to strain and put pressure on humanist modes of identity and belonging. Alongside their academic work, Jovon maintains an exploratory filmic practice that explores the anarchic capacity of Black Spirit as well as a creative writing practice.

(she/they) is a writer-artist, porn archivist, and doctoral student in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Rutgers University. Broadly, K writes, studies, teaches, and creates visual art and music about sexual economies and geographies, transsexualities, black transfeminist theory, and pornography. Most recently, her collaborative experimental pornographic film, Southern Confessions Vol. 1, was featured in Gallery 400 in Chicago, Illinois and her essay titled, “Pleasure Won’t Get You Far: Memory, Nut Chasing, and Hooked On Ebonics” recently published in (De)Cypher: Black Notes on Culture & Criticism. Deeply fascinated with method-making and archival practices, K is interested in the epistemological and physiological function of memory as a troubled mechanism of historicizing and remembering black sexual cultures, economies, and geographies.

(she/they) is a Feminist Studies PhD Candidate and Racial Justice Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They specialize in Black feminisms, Black queer and trans studies, and feminist sports studies. Her research focuses on the self-representation, space-making, and resistance of Black queer and trans athletes in the Women’s National Basketball Association. In addition to their research, they are an adjunct faculty member at DePaul University in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and an educational consultant for collegiate athletic departments nationwide. They are a former D-III women’s basketball player and current 5th grade girls basketball coach.

studies mixed media approaches to travesti/trans life writing and memory preservation across the Americas, using translation as a method to illuminate critical, rhizomatic genealogies of thought. They also serve as Graduate Associate at the Philadelphia Trans Oral History Project through the Center for Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Qui Parle.

(she/they) engages the intersectional constitution of cultural difference with particular focus on trans and queer of color life, art, and embodiment. Their work braids the social sciences with the humanities in service of liberatory political praxes. Recent research includes critical qualitative investigations into trans life, meta-interrogations of disciplinary complacencies in U.S. settler empire-making, the rhetorical construction of transness in monstrous terms, and performative explorations of sensorial economies. They serve as Associate Professor of Critical/Cultural Communication and Performance Studies in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication.

(they/he) has spent almost 20 years as an organizer, facilitator, and political educator. Malcolm’s scholarly work explores the history of gender diversity in the Black diaspora and its impacts on the development of the gender binary, with a specific focus on early modern Central Africa. They have created and led hundreds of trainings with thousands of students, workers, organizers, and artists. In 2017, they co-created Decolonizing Gender, an educational zine and workshop on the relationship between colonialism and the gender binary. They have since facilitated this workshop in universities and social justice organizations around the country. 

is Professor and the Associate Chair of African and African American Studies and Professor and Co-Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an affiliate faculty in the Performing Arts Department, American Cultural Studies Program, and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at WashU.

Marlon is a Black queer theorist and critical/performance ethnographer who studies Black LGBTQ cultural formations, sexual health, and HIV/AIDS prevention. He has served as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor in Africana Studies at Carleton College; the Distinguished Weinberg Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, and a Visiting Professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

is a 2nd year doctoral student in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at ASU. Mary’s research is concerned with how we sustain y/our lives via care work, mutual aid, and community organizing. Mary serves as a Legislative Assembly member for the National Communication Association as the Graduate Student Representative for the Critical/Cultural Studies division.

is a queer, trans, Black Puerto Rican scholar, educator and organizer currently based in Tkaronto. They are an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Trans Studies in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Their current research focus is on pedagogies of abolitionist praxis in the lived experience of Black trans folks and the mobilization of Black trans ways of knowing. Their research and teaching interests include Black trans studies, abolition and transformative justice, political education, critical pedagogies and queer/trans youth of color. Grounded in their extensive experience as a community organizer, Qui views their scholarship as a place to articulate the cultural work they do in relation to their communities. Believing education is a practice of freedom, Qui strives to center personal transformation and healing in every educational space they have the honor to hold and co-create.

is the founder of Rooted Resistance, a grassroots community of practice that reimagines physical activity for Black queer, transgender, and nonbinary people in the United States. They are currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut and Lecturer in the Women’s & Gender Studies Program at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Their dissertation titled “Reimagining ‘Bodywork’ in the wake: A collection of Black Queer, Transgender, and Nonbinary Body Autonomy Oral Testimonies explores the liberatory modalities that BQTN people practice for collective transformation and freedom praxis in the wake of the afterlives of slavery.

Roc completed their BS from Eastern Connecticut State University, M.Ed. from the University of South Florida, and their Ph.D. from Florida State University in Sport Management with a focus in Sport Media and Culture Studies.

is a fat femme third-year graduate student in the English Literature Ph.D. program at ASU. Her current research focuses on how fatness mutes the boundaries of gender on the early modern stage. Her broader academic interests include premodern critical race feminism, queer theories, fat studies, performance studies, and ecopoetics. Rosemary holds an M.A. in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London in partnership with The Globe Theatre, as well as an M.Ed. in International Education from Université de Bordeaux. Additionally, Rosemary is an actor and playwright; her academic work and her art mutually inform one another more often than not.

(he/they, Sicangu Lakota) is a third year PhD student in the Sociology program at ASU. His research focuses on film tropes of Indigenous peoples as intentionally false narratives to maintain colonization, with a special focus on film tropes of Indigenous Queer, trans*, and Two Spirit peoples as dual false narratives to maintain cis- and hetero-patriarchy within the colonial system, with a particular focus on the relationality of Black and Brown colonial subjectivity. As an Adjunct Instructor in Sociology at Pima Community College, Rowan enjoys applying these Indigenizing pedagogies in the classroom.

is a Ph.D. candidate in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research explores the intersection of Black Girlhood Studies and Trans Childhood Studies, focusing on the lived experiences of Black trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming youth who do girlhood differently. Their work examines how varying experiences of trans girlhood reveal the creative possibilities of Black transness. In addition to their academic work, Simone is an artist known as The Editorial Academic, using makeup as their medium. Their face serves as a canvas for bold looks that challenge traditional ideas of “wearable” makeup. Through this artistic expression, Cece seeks to subvert rigid notions of professionalism in academic spaces, illustrating how aesthetics can be a powerful form of resistance.

Diné (They/She) is Diné and Second-Generation Laotian, Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit and an Assistant Professor at Northern Arizona University in Women and Gender Studies and Applied Indigenous Studies. They are originally from Chinle, Arizona on Dinétah (Navajo Nation) but born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona due to displacement, relocation, and removal tactics. Their research focus is primarily on Indigenous Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Studies, Gender construction, urban diaspora, Indigenous masculinities, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives.

(they/she) is a Chicago-born lesbian, arts administrator and curator. They are currently an Access to Excellence Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) pursuing a Master of Arts in Museum and Exhibition Studies and Black Studies. Taylor's research centers black queer, transgender, and non-binary folks' memory work, cultural productions, and museology. In their curatorial endeavors, Roberts has most recently curated Devotion: A Queer Photography Exhibition at LATITUDE, and served as a research assistant for Learning Together: Art Education and Community at Gallery 400, and Beloved Community: African American Artists in Atlanta Collections and Beyond at the Oglethorpe Museum of Art.

is a student at the University of New Mexico who will graduate this May with a double BA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies and a minor in American Studies. They have presented conference papers on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and popular culture such as ““Deep Love: The transformative power of queer love in The Deep,” “Octavia Butler: Busting up the Binary” and “Steven Universe: A Quare Analysis of Alternatives to ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality.’” Tiziana hopes to study the experiences of other Black/trans academics in graduate school.

(They/Them) is a PhD Candidate in the department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their dissertation The Love Ball: A History of New York City's House-Structured Ballroom Culture 1972-1992 provides a historical treatment of the origins of ballroom culture. They use methods of oral history, participatory action research, and broader memory work to engage the pioneers of New York City's house-structured ballroom culture. In 2025, Victor Ultra Omni is the New York University's Hemispheric Institute's 2025 Scholar in Residence and the inaugural Trans Studies at the Commons Fellow at the University of Kansas.

is an associate professor of Trans* Studies in Education at the University of Arizona. Her scholarly work focuses on discourses of gender in education, the pernicious effects of transphobia on trans women, and grief and loss.