Steven Alvarez is Professor of English at St. John's University in Queens. He is the author of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (State University of New York Press) and Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs (National Council of Teachers of English). Dr. Alvarez is also the author of four novels in verse. His The Codex Mojaodicus was the winner of the 2016 Fence Modern Poets Prize. Dr. Alvarez’s current research studies Mexican migration in New York City through the prism of food, specifically “taco literacy.” The research project studies foodways narratives among Mexican communities across the five boroughs, examining confianza enacted as literacies through culinary practices and knowledge, bilingual learning, and community resiliency.

Daniel Borzutzky is LAS Distinguished Professor of English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a poet and translator from Spanish, whose books of poetry include The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press, 2024); Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House Press, 2021); Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh, 2018), Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize; The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry; In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015); The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011). Professor Borzutzky is Co-PI of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative at UIC.

Sergio Delgado Moya is the author of Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil (University of Texas Press, 2017), and of The Logic of Sensationalism: Approaches to Art and Death in the Americas (forthcoming with University of Texas Press). He is co-editor, with Tom Cummins and José Falconi, of ConceptualStumblings, a volume on experimental art in Chile (2019). His translation of Suely Rolnik's Spheres of Insurrection: Notes on Decolonizing the Unconscious (2023) was published by Polity Press.  At the University of Chicago, Sergio offers courses on radical thought in the Americas, the Latin American avant-gardes, art in Chile, Chicanx art and literature, storytelling along the U.S.-Mexico, and the literatures and cultures of Northern Mexico.  He earned a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures from Princeton University, and a B.A. in Philosophy and in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and raised in the Californias.

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor in the department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at CUNY Hunter and is the Directora of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO). She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translated by Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofilia, Contemporânea, Diálogos, and Feminist Formations.

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/Blue Fingernails (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 Times and on CNN.com. Laguna’s first book, Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America, was published by NYU Press in 2017.

Deanna Ledezma is a Tejanx scholar, educator, and curator specializing in the history and theory of photography and contemporary Latinx art. She holds a PhD in art history and serves as the Writing Lab Director of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative. New and forthcoming publications include exhibition catalog essays in Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966-2026 (University of Washington Press, 2026), Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures (Aperture, 2026), and Carmen Lomas Garza: Picturing the Familiar (Arizona State University Art Museum, 2026) as well as a book chapter in Feminist Visual Solidarities and Kinships (Rutgers University Press, 2027). Her book manuscript is called Unsettled Archives: Kinships and Diasporas in Latinx Photography. Working in artistic collaboration with Josh Rios (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and Anthony Romero (Dartmouth College), she co-founded the Place as Practice Research Collective. Their gallery exhibitions include The place where the creek goes underground (Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 2024) and Not So Much in Words: Kinship Citations (Dartmouth College, 2026). To learn more, please visit: www.deannaledezma.com and www.placeaspractice.com. 

Amalia Pallares serves as the Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence and is a professor in the School of Transborder Studies. In her role as vice provost, Pallares provides leadership to advance the university’s charter. Pallares works to ensure that all students, educators and practitioners have broad access to the opportunities, assets, and benefits of ASU, and that all members of the campus community feel they belong and are supported in their success at the university. 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.

Francisco E. Robles is Associate Professor of English, Latino Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. 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. His essay "Against Emptiness: Desert Migrations and the Poetics of Inhabitation," is in press for the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration.

Danielle Roper is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.  She is the author of Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas.  Roper has published broadly on questions of racial and queer performance in GLQ, Latin American Research Review, and Small Axe.  She is from Kingston, Jamaica.

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. He is also Director of Stanford’s Program in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Global Ethnography. Rosa’s research centers on joint analyses of racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and educational inequity. He 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). His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and Univision.

Barbara Sostaita is a scholar of religion and global migration and assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She grew up undocumented in the south, the daughter of a minister who taught her how religion informs and shapes migrant-led organizing. Her book, Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, is an ethnographic study of fugitive care practices in the Sonoran Desert and considers how people on the move—including migrants, artists, and organizers—engage with the sacred to cross and transgress borders. Professor Sostaita holds a doctoral degree in Religious Studies with a Certificate in Women's and Gender Studies from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work has been published in American Religion and Southern Cultures, The Nation and Teen Vogue. At UIC, she teaches courses on Latinx religions, transnational migration, and undocumented social movements.

Roberto Tejada is the author of art and media histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), a book-length study on the groundbreaking Mexican American multimedia artist Celia Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; Minnesota, 2009), and essay collections on Latin American and Latinx art and culture, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019), and Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América(Fordham, 2026). Awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, his poetry collections include Carbonate of Copper (Fordham, 2025), Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). He serves as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches Creative Writing and Art History.

Michelle Téllez is a Distinguished Scholar, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Mexican American Studies Program at the University of Arizona. An interdisciplinary scholar trained in Community Studies, Sociology, Chicana/o Studies and Education, she has been committed to mapping projects of resistance, exploring shared human experiences and advancing social justice for the last 20 years. Her public and academic scholarship focuses on transnational community formations, mothering, and gendered migration along the U.S./Mexico borderlands. She co-edited The ChicanaM(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución (2019) and is the author of Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect (2021), winner of the 2023 NACCS book of the year award. In 2025, she received the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) Tortuga Award.

María de los Ángeles Torres is University Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and Co-Principal Investigator of Crossing Latinidades. She received her PhD from theUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the former Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research. Dr. Torres is the author of Democracy and Time in Cuban Thought: The Elusive Present (UPF, 2024); The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US and the Promise of a Better Future (Beacon Press, 2004); In the Land of Mirrors: and The Politics of Cuban Exiles in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 1999). She is co-author of Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas (University of Illinois Press, 2013). In addition, she has edited By Heart/De Memoria: Cuban Women's Journeys In and Out of Exile (Temple, 2002), and co-editor of Global Cities and Immigrants: A Comparative Study of Chicago and Madrid, (Peter Lang, 2015), and Borderless Borders: Latinos, Latin American and the Paradoxes of Interdependence (Temple, 1998). She has published on issues of diversity, US/Cuba relations, and immigration.