SaraEllen Strongman is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of Black Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She researches and writes about Black feminisms, Black women’s political and cultural history, and African American literature. She received her Ph.D. in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining DAAS as an assistant professor, SaraEllen spent two years as an LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow. Her manuscript in progress, The Sisterhood: Black Women, Black Feminism, and the Women’s Liberation Movement, examines the moment when black women began calling themselves “Black feminists” during the 1970s and 1980s and how they pushed a predominantly white feminist movement to respond to their concerns and broaden their platform while simultaneously building their own autonomous institutions and the burgeoning field we now know as Black feminist thought. Her work has been published in Feminist Theory, Feminist Studies, Sinister Wisdom, and The Washington Post.

Cheryl L. Clarke is a lesbian poet, essayist, educator and a Black feminist community activist. Her scholarship focuses on African-American women’s literature, black lesbian feminism, and the Black Arts Movement. She maintains a teaching affiliation with the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is the author of Cheryl Clarke 1980-2005 (Carroll and Graf, 2006). She is the recipient of the 2013 Kessler Award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Among them: (CLAGS) at the City University of New York. Thanks to Julie R. Enszer, readers may access a digitized version of her work Narratives at the Lesbian Poetry Archive. In 2014, Sinister Wisdom 91 co-published Cheryl Clarke’s book, Living as a Lesbian after its initial publication in 1986. “Living as a Lesbian captured the vitality and volatility of the lesbian world; today, in a world both changed and unchanged, Clarke’s poems continue to illuminate our lives and make new meanings for Living as a Lesbian.” She co-edited To Be Left with the Body, a literary publication of the AIDS Project Los Angeles for men of color who have sex with men with Steven G. Fullwood in 2008. By My Precise Haircut was selected in 2016 as one of the winners of the Hilary Tham Capital Competition, sponsored by The Word Works Press of Washington, DC, and judged by distinguished poet, Kimiko Hahn. Targets, a Chapbook, was published in 2020 by Bushel Collective of Delhi, New York. The book is dedicated to Miriam Carey, Sandra Bland, and “all Black women who have died unarmed at the hands of the State.”

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of three books: Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel; The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA; and the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College. In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young Black women through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. Big Girl explores race, gender, bodies, and what happens when we insist on taking up space in the world. Mecca is Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in African American poetry and poetics, Black queer and feminist literatures, and creative writing.

Alexis Bard Johnson is the Curator at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. She oversees the exhibitions, programs, and art collection at one of the largest repositories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer materials in the world. She most recently curated Looking for Lesbians and Archival Intimacies: Queering South/East Asian Diasporas. Previously, she curated Six (Linear) Feet and the online exhibition Safer at Home. She is currently working on Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation, one of the exhibitions in the Getty’s 2024 Pacific Standard Time and Queer Black California: Art and Politics with the California African American Museum. Johnson earned her PhD in Art History with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University in 2019. Her essay, “The Work of Being Sexed: Andy Warhol on Drag,” appeared in Contact Warhol: Photography Without End (MIT, 2018). She also contributed to the revised edition of Art and Queer Culture (Phaidon, 2019). Before joining the ONE Archives, Johnson worked at the Princeton Art Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. When she is not researching and writing about queer visual culture, she loves to spend time baking and gardening. Originally from Chicago, she now lives in Los Angeles with her wife and their two tuxedo cats.

Pat Parker was born in Houston, Texas, in 1944. Parker wrote five collections of poetry during her lifetime, Jonestown & Other Madness, Movement in Black, Womanslaughter, Pit Stop, and Child of Myself. Parker’s poems appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and anthologies, and are collected in The Complete Works of Pat Parker. Her letter with Audre Lorde are published in Sister Love. Known for her electric performances of her poems, including on the album Where Would I Be Without You from Olivia Records and Lesbian Concentrate, Parker enchanted audiences with her fire for justice and her belief in change. Parker directed the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Oakland, founded the Women’s Revolutionary Council and the Women’s Press Collective, and testified before the United Nations on the status of women. She died of breast cancer in June of 1989. A new collection of her work, Essential Poems by Pat Parker, introduces new audiences to Parker’s fire, passion, tenderness, and vision for the world.