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SAFIYA SINCLAIR
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, the stunning story of her struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “a tour de force” and Kirkus Review writes that the book is “more than catharsis; this is a memoir as liberation.” She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Website
R. ERIC THOMAS
R. Eric Thomas is the bestselling author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and the YA novel Kings of B’more, a Stonewall Honor book. Both books were also featured as Read with Jenna book-club picks on Today. He is also a television writer (Apple TV+’s Dickinson, FX’s Better Things), a Lambda Literary Award-winning playwright, and the long-running host of The Moth in Philadelphia. For four years, he was a senior staff writer at ELLE online, where he wrote the popular “Eric Reads the News” column. His latest book, “Congratulations, The Best Is Over,” is a collection of heartening, deeply relatable, and laugh-out-loud essays about what happens after happily ever after. Website
J. WORTHAM
J Wortham is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and co-host of the podcast ‘Still Processing.’ They occasionally publish thoughts on culture, technology and wellness in a newsletter. J is the proud editor of the visual anthology “Black Futures,” a 2020 Editor's choice by The New York Times Book Review, along with Kimberly Drew, from One World. J is also currently working on a book about the body and dissociation for Penguin Press. J Wortham is also a sound healer, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker oriented towards healing justice and liberation.
NO-NO BOY
No-No Boy tells stories rooted in years of research and relationship-building, made vibrant and profound through a rich congregation of instrumental, environmental, and electronically manipulated sounds from Asia and America. The project developed as the central component of Julian Saporiti’s PhD at Brown University, drawing on years of fieldwork and research on Asian American history to write folk songs with uncommon empathy and remarkable protagonists: prisoners at Japanese American internment camps who started a jazz band, Vietnamese musicians turned on to rock ‘n’ roll by American troops, a Cambodian American painter who painted only the most beautiful landscapes of his war-torn home. Along the way he started to draw on his own family’s history, including his mother’s escape from Vietnam during the war. His 2021 album 1975 was called "a remarkably powerful and moving album,” by Folk Alley and “gentle, catchy and accessible folk songs that feel instantly familiar," by NPR. His third album, "Empire Electric", further examines narratives of imperialism, identity, and spirituality, and is being released by Smithsonian Folkways this fall.