Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024) and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human,received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches in English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Rosa M. Cabrera is the Executive Director of the Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center at UIC. Her research and praxis work focuses on understanding environmental and climate change problems as a social issue within larger systems of power and privilege; scrutinizing the role of social and environmental justice in museums and cultural centers; and using methodologies for public engagement that are centered on the arts and humanities to harness first voice stories and community knowledge to create culturally relevant and place-based solutions. Cabrera is an adjunct faculty in the Department of Anthropology, Graduate College, Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, and Museum and Exhibition Studies. She is Co-PI in the Crossing Latinidades’ Climate and Environmental Justice project at UIC; Keller Science Action Center Associate at the Field Museum; and a Faculty Fellow with the Humanities Action Lab working on the Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice project.

Marta Caminero-Santangelo is a University Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of Kansas as well as the Editor-in-Chief of Latino Studies and the Vice President of the Latina/x/o Studies Association. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century U.S. Latine literary studies; she is the author of Documenting the Undocumented: Latina/o Narrative and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper (2016), On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (2007), and The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive (1998). She was born in Canada to Cuban immigrant parents.

Ralph Cintrón is professor emeritus of English and Latin American and Latino Studies and Senior Researcher at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  He is a former Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, honorable mention winner for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association, and a Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America. He is the author of Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday as well as Democracy as Fetish.  He is also the co-editor of Culture, Catastrophe + Rhetoric and Co-Pi of 60 Years of Migration: Puerto Ricans in Chicagoland.  He is currently writing with a philosopher Natures and Their Cosmologies, a text about planetary heating inside modernity’s political economy.  In conjunction with this last project he is working with climate scientists on a $25 million grant funded through the Department of Energy to Argonne National Laboratory and UIC.

Esther Díaz Martín is an assistant professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies and the Gender and Women's Studies program at UIC since 2019. She graduated from UT Austin in 2018 with a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures and a graduate concentration in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. She holds an MA in Spanish from San Jose State University (2011) and BA in Political Science form CSU Stanislaus (2005). She was born in Jalisco and grew up in a mix-status family, experiencing the politics of Prop 187 as child of campesinos in in Central California (Merced County). Her book Radiophonic Feminisms: Latina Voices in the Digital Age of Broadcasting (UT Press, August 2025) is inspired by the soundscapes of her childhood and the role in which locutoras informed her feminist path. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary, ethnographic, and media studies with Chicana feminist angle to investigate gender politics in popular culture with an attention across commercial radio, music, sound media, literature, and digital storytelling. She is co-principal investigator of the Latinx sound culture working group.

Rachel Havrelockis Professor of English and Director of The Freshwater Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  The Freshwater Lab conducts research and generates policy concerning the North American Great Lakes, creates digital storytelling sites like Freshwater Stories and The Backward River, and trains the next generation of water leaders. Rachel trained in environmental peacebuilding with the NGO Ecopeace Middle East and the US Department of State, which awarded her its Alumni Impact Award.  She is the author of two books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line and The Joshua Generation, as well as the groundbreaking hip-hop play From Tel Aviv to Ramallah.  Havrelock is currently writing a book about oil pipelines.  

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Escenas transcaribeñas: ensayos sobre teatro, performance y cultura (Isla Negra Editores, 2018), and Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance(University of Michigan Press, 2021), and coeditor of Keywords for Latina/o Studies (New York University Press, 2017). His books of fiction include Uñas pintadas de azul/BlueFingernails (2009) and Abolición del pato (2013). Larry performs in drag as Lola von Miramar since 2010 and has appeared in several episodes of the YouTube series Cooking with Drag Queens. He is currently writing a book on contemporary Puerto Rican performance.

Albert Sergio Laguna is Associate Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching interests include transnational Latinx literatures and cultures, comparative ethnic studies, performance studies, and popular culture studies. His award-winning teaching and research has been featured in Latino Studies, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Latin American Research Review, Contemporary Literature, Cultural Critique, Diario de Cuba, Miami Herald, Washington Post, New York Timesand on CNN.com. Laguna’s first book, Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America, was published by NYU Press in 2017.

Deanna Ledezma (she/her) is a Tejanx scholar, writer, and educator specializing in the history and theory of photography, Latinx contemporary art and visual culture, and life writing. She is the Postdoctoral Research Associate and Writing Lab Director of the Crossing LatinidadesHumanities Research Initiative. In addition, she is a nonfiction writer, creative practitioner, and co-founder of the Place as Practice Research Collective with Josh Rios and Anthony Romero. Her book project is called Unsettled Archives: Kinships and Diasporas in Latinx Photography. Forthcoming publications include chapters in Feminist Visual Solidarities and Kinships and the Routledge Companion to Latinx Art as well as exhibition catalogue essays on Sophie Rivera and Carmen Lomas Garza. Her previous publications have appeared in Art Journal, Photography & Culture, caa.reviews, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, The Latinx Project’s Intervenxions, and the book Reworking Labor. To learn more, please visit: www.deannaledezma.com and www.placeaspractice.com. 

Amalia Pallares is Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence and professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. Prior to ASU she was at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she served as a vice chancellor and professor of political science and Latin American and Latino studies. Additionally, she served as associate dean for educational programming and interdisciplinary studies in its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 2006-2008. Pallares' research focuses on the political histories and racial and ethnic identities of social movements with an emphasis on immigrant and indigenous communities in the U.S. and Latin America.  She is the author and editor of several books and other publications. She continues this line of research in the School of Transborder Studies at ASU.

Tatiana Reinoza is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame and a past member of the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. A recognized specialist within the field of Latinx art, Dr. Reinoza’s work centers on reproductive mediums, such as printmaking and photography, and how these are deployed to create self-representational narratives. Her writing has appeared in the Archives of American Art Journal, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, as well as edited volumes and exhibition catalogues such as ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now. Her first book, Reclaiming the Americas:  Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory (UT Press, 2023) received awards from the American Historical Print Collectors Society, the Association for Ethnic Studies, and the International Latino Book Awards. Along with Karen Mary Davalos, she co-edited the anthology Self Help Graphics at Fifty (UC Press, 2023) which commemorates the golden anniversary of this East LA arts institution. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and earned awards from the Association of Print Scholars, the College Art Association, and the Latin American Studies Association. She is currently at work on a new book project titled Retorno: Art and Kinship in the Making of a Central American Diaspora.

Francisco E. Robles is Associate Professor of English, Latino Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame, as well as the co-editor of Post45: Contemporaries. He is the author of Coalition Literature (Stanford University Press, 2025). Articles, reviews, and chapters can be found in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Post45: Peer Reviewed, Latino Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Chiricú, A Contracorriente, Post45: Contemporaries, and Killing the Buddha, as well as the collections Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities, the Routledge Handbook of Latinx Life Writing, Deserts Are Not Empty, and Latinx Literature in Transition, 1992-2020.

Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Rosa is author of the award-winning book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press), and co-editor of the volume, Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge). He attained an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Linguistics and Educational Studies at Swarthmore College.