Porsha Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Olayiwola is Brown University's 2019 Heimark Artist -In -Residence as well as the 2021 Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is a 2020 poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American poets. Olayiwola earned her MFA in poetry from Emerson College and is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston. Her work can be found in or forthcoming from with TriQuarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, The Academy of American Poets, Netflix, Wildness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere.

Professor Benjamin Carp focuses particularly on urban politics, society, and culture in eighteenth-century America. His books include _Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America_, which won the triennial Society of the Cincinnati Cox Book Prize in 2013; and _Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution_. He has also written articles for Colonial Williamsburg, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. His desire to pursue a Ph.D. in history began with an article by Alfred F. Young on George Robert Twelves Hewes. Since then, he has written scholarly articles about firefighters and the American Revolution, nationalism during the Revolution and the Civil War, leadership in the work of Edmund S. Morgan, and Quaker merchants in Charleston. He received the Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2005), the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2003) and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (1998). Prior to joining Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, he taught at the University of Edinburgh and Tufts University.

Charles Coe is a poet, prose writer, teacher of writing and a musician. His books include _All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents_ and _Picnic on the Moon_, both published by Leapfrog Press as well as _Spin Cycles_, a novella published by Gemma Media. He received a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light in 2014.” In 2017 he was an Artist-in-Residence for the city of Boston. Charles served as poet-in-residence at Wheaton College and at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York and has taught in Dingle, Ireland for the Bay Path University MFA Abroad program. He is an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, teaching poetry and nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program.

Darren Cole seeks to blend emerging technologies with contemporary art practices through the form of site specific research. As a film and video professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, he created performance based work using 16mm film and interactive video. He was the first ever Digital Storyteller at Boston City Hall, Art New England Magazine nominated him as one of the top emerging artists of 2019, and as an artist fellow at Revolutionary Spaces, his installation “When Up, Look Down” was on view at Old South Meeting House 2021-2022.