Cultural Heritage Speakers
Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, Raquel Cepeda is an award-winning journalist, cultural activist, podcaster, and documentary filmmaker who travels widely to speak to diverse audiences about Latina identity, social justice, gentrification and inequality.
Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer, translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy. She is the author of This is the Year, Your Biome Has Found You, and Danzirly, which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award. Her other honors include an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Hedgebrook Fellowship, being a Macondista, Highlights Foundation’s Diverse Verse Fellowship, Lumina’s Multilingual Writing Award, and a part of Las Musas. She is proud to be St. Pete's first Latina poet laureate. Through Moonlit Música, a bilingual media company she co-founded, she writes narrative scripts and songs for children, adolescent, and adult programming. Notable clients include The New York Times, Comedy Central, hulu, Rebel Girls, Apple tv, Google, FX, and Hatch, for which she has developed beloved sleep story characters, including Mari Mariposa, a bilingual butterfly with a passion for community building.
Patricia Engel is the author of five works of fiction. Her most recent book, a short story collection titled The Faraway World, was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, longlisted for The Story Prize, and named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, and a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year. Patricia has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and an O. Henry Award. Her books have been translated into many languages and selected as an NEA Big Read. Born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey, Patricia is a graduate of New York University and earned her MFA at Florida International University. She is a Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami.
Matthew Salesses is a novelist, scholar, and Korean adoptee who has written and spoken widely on the subjects of adoption, race, Asian American culture, Korean media, and parenting. His acclaimed first novel, The Hundred-Year Flood, was an Amazon Bestseller and, among other honors, a Best Book of the season at Buzzfeed, Refinery29, and Gawker. His newest novel, The Sense of Wonder, was recently published to great acclaim and optioned by HBO.
Annabelle Tometich went from medical-school reject to line cook to journalist to author. She spent 18 years as a food writer and restaurant critic for The News-Press in her hometown of Fort Myers, Florida. Her first book, The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony (2024, Little Brown) explores her relationship with her Filipina mother and was called “sweet, sharp” by The New York Times.
Author of Night in the American Village and a forthcoming title about her grandfather’s experiences at Tule Lake Concentration Camp, Akemi Johnson strives to advance racial equity, social justice, and human rights in her writing and work. She is an educator at the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, where she teaches the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans and promotes the importance of remembering this history.
Priya Huq is a Bangladeshi Texan cartoonist living in New York who speaks widely on issues related to the comics industry, art, race, culture, identity and their intersections. Her appearances include the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Emerald City Comic Con, and New York Comic Con. In her talks, Priya focuses on practical advice for marginalized artists and cartoonists. Audiences will learn how trauma affects an artist's brain and techniques for creating after trauma. Priya is an outspoken voice in the conversation around diversity in comics and her work explores race and multiculturalism in America.
A political commentator and contributor to broadcast news outlets, Susan Abulhawa is one of the most widely read Arab authors in the world. She speaks widely on the subjects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the power of storytelling, particularly for marginalized communities. Susan is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a non-profit organization dedicated to upholding the Right to Play for Palestinian children under Israeli occupation and in refugee camps outside of Palestine.
A graphic novelist and Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California-Irvine, Sherine Hamdy speaks nationally and internationally on the role of comics as a teaching tool and on social justice and representation in comics. Sherine writes out of a desire to contribute to more honest depictions of Arab and Muslim Americans, particularly in the space of bioethics. In 2017, she published a graphic novel co-authored with Coleman Nye called Lissa: A Story of Friendship, Medical Promise, and Revolution (University of Toronto/EthnoGRAPHICS). This story draws on Sherine’s work on Muslim ethics and health care practices in Egypt, as well as Coleman Nye's research on women in the U.S. who test positive for the BRCA cancer gene.
Joel Christian Gill is the Inaugural Chair of Boston University’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Narrative and Associate Professor in the CFA School of Visual Arts. He is also a cartoonist and historian who speaks nationally on the importance of sharing stories and uplifting Black history all year long. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir Fights: One Boy's Triumph Over Violence, cited as one of the best graphic novels of 2020 by The New York Times and for which he was awarded the 2021 Cartoonist Studio Prize. He also created the art for the graphic novel adaption of Stamped from the Beginning.
"The beauty and promise of America lies in our ability to confront even the most painful parts of our history—not to shame ourselves, but to better understand who we are and who we still have the power to become."
Lee Hawkins is an American investigative journalist and author who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2022. His most recent work, I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free, is an introspective journey into his family history, tracing its roots through Jim Crow Era and enslavement to pre-Revolutionary America.
Trevor Baldwin is the nephew of James Baldwin and his godmother was Maya Angelou. He speaks of his personal experiences growing up with these two icons of Black literature and protecting their cultural legacy.
“I build technologies that remember—so the world can’t forget. Each line of code holds a testimony, each archive a reckoning. My work gathers what injustice tried to erase, and reimagines what justice has yet to be.”
Dr. Allissa V. Richardson is an award-winning journalist, author, and associate professor at USC Annenberg. She founded the Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab, where she leads the Second Draft Project—an AI-powered oral history initiative preserving the voices of those impacted by police violence. The three-time Harvard Fellow is the author of Bearing Witness While Black and the forthcoming Canceled (MIT Press). Her work explores reparative journalism, Black witnessing, and the ethics of emerging technologies in media.
From VIBE editor-in-chief to Stanford Fellow to the New York Times —decode culture with America's most astute pop chronicler. Award-winning journalist Danyel Smith is author of the critically-acclaimed Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop (One World / Penguin Random House, April 2022). Danyel is also creator/host of the popular Black Girl Songbook, a podcast that centers the sounds and stories of black women (Spotify Original).
Bridgett M. Davis is the award-winning author of the memoirs Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy and The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers. Davis is also the writer and director of the 1998 award-winning feature film Naked Acts, newly restored by Milestone Films and released in 2024 to critical acclaim, and screening in theaters across the US as well as international venues. She is is Professor Emerita in the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she taught creative, narrative and film writing.
Dr. Jasmine Brown began writing Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century when she was twenty-two. A 2018 recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship, she used her time at the University of Oxford to complete the in-depth research and oral histories synthesized in this book. In the spring of 2020, she graduated from Oxford with Merit, earning an M.Phil. in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. That fall, she began medical school at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently finishing up her ophthalmology residency at Stanford University. Brown leverages her connection to her topic to create a work that is both immensely well-researched and personal.
Ladee Hubbard is the author of two novels: The Talented Ribkins which received the 2017 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the 2018 Hurston-Wright Award for Debut Fiction, and The Rib King (2021). The Last Suspicious Holdout (2022), her collection of short stories, explores the relationships between friends, family and strangers in a Black neighborhood over fifteen years. Her acclaimed scholarship includes a focus on marginalized women in literature.
Kai Harris is a writer and educator from Detroit, Michigan, who uses her voice to uplift the Black community through realistic fiction centered on the experiences of Black girls and Black women. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, What the Fireflies Knew, won the 2023 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and was selected as a Marie Claire Book Club pick, amongst other honors. She also speaks passionately Black mental health, particularly through the lenses of marriage and motherhood.
Jamilah Pitts is an author, educator, social entrepreneur, and wellness guide whose work centers the liberation, healing and holistic development of communities of the Global Majority. In particular, Jamilah trains others to support Black girls and girlhood. Jamilah has worked and served in various roles and spaces to promote racial justice and healing and is the author of Toward Liberation.
Layla F. Saad is the author of the ground-breaking Me and White Supremacy, an anti-racism education workbook that debuted on the New York Times and USA Today bestsellers lists. It is also an Amazon, Wall Street Journal, Indie, and Pacific Northwest bestseller. Layla is an East African, Arab, British, Black, Muslim, neurodivergent woman who was born and grew up in the West, and lives in the Middle East. Layla has always sat at a unique intersection of identities from which she is able to draw rich and intriguing perspectives and share them with others.
“More often than not conversations about autism are led by people who parent autistic children or care for an autistic person in their life. While these are important pathways to collective understanding, autistic people themselves can no longer afford to be left out of the discourse.”
Jezz Chung is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores personal and collective change through the lens of race, gender, trauma, disability, and neurodivergence.
Kristen Arnett is the queer author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the NYT bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her latest novel Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (Riverhead Books, 2025) explores the themes of humor and community. Kristen speaks widely on the topics of intellection freedom and queer authorship. She currently writes a popular column for LitHub and has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University. She lives in Orlando, Florida.
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, won the 2023 PEN Open Book Award. Hafizah is also the author of the debut poetry collection Un-American, nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award, a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize.
Anthony R. Keith, Jr., Ph.D. (Tony) is a Black, gay spoken word artist, poet, and Hip-Hop educator. His debut, How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, is a powerful YA memoir in verse, tracing his journey from being a closeted gay Black teen battling poverty, racism, and homophobia to becoming an openly gay first-generation college student who finds freedom in poetry. He uses his knowledge in educational leadership to help students find their voice and teaches educators how to do the same.