Jerry Thompson is a bookseller, poet, playwright, and musician. His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA and the James White Review. He is the coauthor of Images of America: Black Artists in Oakland. His fiction and prose have appeared in various anthologies including In the Life, edited by Joseph Beam; Voices Rising, edited by G. Winston James; and Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, edited by E. Lynn Harris. He is the co-editor of Oakland Noir with Eddie Muller, and Berkeley Noir with Owen Hill. His new book, Horn Dog: essays, poems and half promises, is forthcoming.

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Nancy Cato is a character-driven illustrator deeply influenced by lived experiences with an endearing homage to her childhood through an array of  enlightening and whimsical expressions of being Black, while weaving together the nuances of joy, struggle, resilience, and cultural heritage that define our narratives. Cato has exhibited at The African American Art & Cultural Complex in San Francisco; Arts Commission Main Gallery, San Francisco; Hunters Point Shipyard, Bayview; Thacher Gallery, San Francisco; Strut, San Francisco; USF Thacher Gallery, San Francisco; Room Gallery, Mill Valley; Art Pad, San Francisco; Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, IL; among others. Cato is a current recipient of the SF Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Grant. She will illustrate the narratives of ten queer tomboys in a project loosely titled “The Tomboy Chronicles.”

Jeneé Darden is an award-winning journalist, author, public speaker, and mental health advocate from Oakland, Calif. She is the host and executive producer of the weekly KALW arts show "Sights & Sounds." Jenee has reported for NPR, Marketplace, KQED, KPCC, The Los Angeles Times, Ebony, Refinery29, and other outlets. In 2005, she reported on the London transit bombings for Time magazine. She is the author of When a Purple Rose Blooms (Black Lawrence Press), a collection of essays and poetry about her personal journey through Black womanhood. She curates the reading series Let Her Tell It! about Black women and mental health. Jeneé holds a BA in ethnic studies from UC San Diego and a master’s in journalism from the University of Southern California.

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Ajuan Mance is an artist and writer based in Oakland, California.  She is a Professor of Illustration at the California College of the Arts and a Professor Emeritus of English at Mills College. She is the author of two academic books, Inventing Black Women: African American Women’s Poetry and Self-Representation and Before Harlem: An Anthology of African American Literature from the Long Nineteenth Century. Ajuan is also the author and illustrator of the portrait collections 1001 Black Men and Living While Black, as well as the children’s  picture book What Do Brothas Do All Day. Ajuan’s comics have appeared in several anthologies, including, most recently, Drawing Power, COVID Chronicles, and We Belong: An All-Black, All-Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comics Anthology. Gender Studies, her first book of comics, was nominated for the 2024 Ignatz Award for Best Comics Collection.

Michael Ross is a visual artist and a native of Laurel, Mississippi. After earning art degrees from the University of Mississippi and Northern Illinois University, he lived in San Francisco for more than twenty-five years where he exhibited his art throughout the Bay Area and participated in arts and cultural organizations such as Colors of Black, AfroSolo, BGLAM (Black Gay Letters and Arts Movement), and The 3.9 Art Collective. Michael believes that when he moved from San Francisco back to Laurel in 2017, he carried with him extensive Bay Area influences still evident in his art and curatorial practice. In the fall of 2022, he moved to Key West, Florida, where he is the Director of Exhibitions and Education at The Studios of Key West.