HAFIZAH AUGUSTUS GETER is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. She is the author of The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, forthcoming from Random House (9.20.22) and the poetry collection Un-American, an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb, The Believer, The Paris Review, among many others. The poetry committee co-chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, she is a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a 92Y Women inPower Fellow. She holds an BA in English and economics from Clemson University, an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago, an MFA in nonfiction from New York University, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Hafizah lives in Brooklyn, New York.
DANIEL RAMOS is a Mexican American artist and photographer who divides his time between New Haven, CT, Brooklyn, NY, and Monterrey, MX. Ramos received a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2003 and has recently expanded his practice to include photomontage, sculpture and installation. His solo exhibitions include Artpace in San Antonio, TX and Filter Photo in Chicago, IL. His work has been featured in NYTimes Lens, PDN online, and AI-AP Latin America and is in the permanent collections of Leo Burnett Worldwide and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. Ramos was an Artist in residence at Light Work, Syracuse, NY in June 2021 and completed the 2020-2021 Pollock-Krasner Residency at ISCP in Brooklyn, NY. Ramos has been a visiting artist lecturer at Yale University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts among others. He was the recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize in 2018.
JORGE LUIS GONZÁLEZ BALLEZA is a transmedia creator and artist born in Monterrey, Nuevo León with roots in Sonora and Coahuila. He has transited between design, photography and video as tools for the documentation of traditions, communities and historical sites in different parts of northeastern and south Mexico. He facilitates meetings for reflection and community which he approaches from design and the arts. Promoter of the digital medium Sabotaje Media that seeks to go to the root of the cumbia and urban culture of the region. Sabotaje Media is a media platform focused on narrating, navigating and mapping subaltern realities: those which live and breathe in the margins and the urban environment. Along with others, they are responsible for curating events such as Rebajado MX and supporting Sonidero culture and musical groups within Monterrey. They document the crossroads where politics, music and culture meet. They use audio-visual remixes as the primary tool in understanding our epoch. They play live as Sonidero Sabotaje.