Dr. Gina M. Pérez is a cultural anthropologist and chair of the Department of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. Dr. Pérez’s interdisciplinary scholarship explores the lived experiences of Latina/o communities through the lenses of migration, militarism, youth, gender, and faith-based organizing. She received a PhD in anthropology from Northwestern University (2000), an MA  from Northwestern University (1996), and a BA from the University of Notre Dame (1990). Her work is deeply rooted in ethnographic research and community engagement, especially in the U.S. Midwest and Puerto Rico. Dr. Pérez is the author of Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities (NYU Press, 2024), and the award-winning Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC and the American Dream (New York University Press, 2015) and The Near Northwest Side Story: Gender, Migration and Puerto Rican Families (University of California Press, 2004). She has also coedited two anthologies: Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades (coedited with Alex Chávez, University of New Mexico Press, 2022, School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series) and Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America (coedited with Frank Guridy and Adrian Burgos Jr., New York University Press, 2011). Dr. Pérez teaches courses that are grounded in community-based learning and research methods, theories, and practice that connect students to Latina/o/x communities in Lorain and throughout Northeast Ohio. With the support and guidance of the Oberlin College Libraries’ staff, she works with students to develop their skills of public and community engagement by developing web-based platforms like Omeka to share research findings with a broader public.

Quiara Alegría Hudes is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Water By the Spoonful; author of a memoir, My Broken Language; and screenwriter of the animated film Vivo. Together with Lin-Manuel Miranda, she wrote the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical In the Heights and the screenplay for its feature film adaptation. Her essays have appeared in The Nation, The Cut, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and American Theater Magazine. Hudes and her cousin Sean cofounded Emancipated Stories, helping people behind bars share one page of their life story with the world. She has keynoted alongside Gabriela Sanchez on the joys and madness of a Philly Rican sisterhood in theater.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, with his family from Puerto Rico, Reverend David Ramos was brought up Catholic, but at age 16, he had a “born again” experience on the streets of Brooklyn and began to attend a “hippie-like” church that was part of the historical Jesus movement. Rev. Ramos is pastor of Third Christian Church Disciples of Christ in Hamilton Heights and a teaching pastor at the NYC hub of the Passion Center, a Phygital Faith Community and Missional Training Center. As Founder and Facilitator of the Latino Leadership Circle – a network of leaders that provides spiritual, emotional, and moral support and training for established and emerging leaders – he produces podcasts and conducts advocacy on theological and social-justice issues. Rev. Ramos has worked intimately with trauma, death & dying, and grief as a Hospice Chaplain with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. He provides training and technical assistance to churches, corporations, networks, and non-profit organizations on trauma, grief and loss, conflict resolution, and resiliency. His faith journey has roots in the Hispanic Assemblies of God Pentecostal church; the Quaker church; the Presbyterian and Reformed churches, conducting pulpit supply; the emerging church, where he participated in dialogues; and a megachurch, serving as a staff minister. Rev. Ramos served as Chancellor of Faith International Bible School and the Director of Covenant Ministries International, Inc., where he conducted global and regional support work and provided training to international pastors and emerging leaders. In addition, he was the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the American Bible Society. Rev. Ramos holds a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Master of Social Work from Rutgers University. He enjoys hiking, trail running, and motorcycle riding and lives in the Bronx.

George McWhirter is an Irish-Canadian writer, translator, editor, and teacher, as well as Vancouver’s first poet laureate. He has translated works by Mario Arregui, Carlos Fuentes, and José Emilio Pacheco. He was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2024 for his translation of Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence (New Directions, 2023).

One of Latin America’s foremost literary figures, Homero Aridjis was born in Contepec, Michoacán, Mexico. He has written fifty-one books of poetry and prose and has won many important literary prizes. Formerly Mexico’s ambassador to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and UNESCO, he is also the president emeritus of PEN International and the founder and president of the Group 100, an environmentalist association of artists and scientists.

Miriam Guadalupe Juárez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at New York University where she specializes in Chicanx and Latinx literature and culture through the lens of space, migration, and power. Juárez is the 2022 recipient of the Urban Doctoral Fellowship, and proudly served as the coordinator of The Latinx Project Graduate Working Group at NYU for four years. She is a 2024-2025 Public Humanities Doctoral Fellow at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center.

Dr. Ish Ruiz is an assistant professor of Latinx and Queer Decolonial Theology at Pacific School of Religion and holds a PhD in Theology and Ethics from the Graduate Theological Union. Dr. Ruiz is also the coordinator of the Latinx Roundtable of the Center for LGBTQ+ and Gender Studies in Religion housed at PSR. His prior appointments include a post-doctoral fellow at Candler School of Theology at Emory University and an adjunct professor at the University of Dayton. He also worked at the secondary school level for 11 years, chaired the Marianist LGBTQ+ Initiative team, served as a union activist to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ Church employees, and presented at various pastoral conferences throughout the US. A native of Puerto Rico and a queer Catholic theologian, Dr. Ruiz’s research interests explore the intersection between Catholic moral theology, queer theology, Latinx theology, ecclesiology, sexual ethics, liberation, human rights, and Catholic education. He is the author of LGBTQ+ Educators in Catholic Schools: Embracing Synodality, Inclusivity, and Justice (Rowman & Littlefield, fall 2024) and a co-editor of Cornerstones: Sacred Stories of LGBTQ+ Employees in Catholic Institutions (New Ways Ministry, fall 2024). He has published several academic and public theology articles in the field of Catholic theological ethics and has ministered in Catholic schools and parishes on matters of LGBTQ+ and Latinx inclusion throughout the nation.

Dr. Colleen Mary Mallon, OP, is a theologian, educator, and animator of mission formation. Sister Mallon holds a PhD in systematic and philosophical theology from the Graduate Theological Union and has taught systematic theology at the university level, including at Aquinas Institute of Theology. She currently serves as a director of adult mission formation for the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose.

Jacinto Zarabata, a young Kogi from Colombia, showcased his short film “Home Among the Clouds” at the biodiversity COP16 in Cali, Colombia (Oct/Nov 2024), with the help of the Tairona Heritage Trust. Like many Indigenous people, Jacinto has deep-seated concerns about the environmental changes impacting his community and felt driven to share a message in the hope of reshaping perceptions of the physical world. As guardians of ancient Indigenous wisdom, the Kogi maintain that they have divine responsibility to care for the earth, given to them by the Great Mother, Aluna. The Kogi message is simple, We must take care of our planet because it is the Home of All. Jacinto’s film offers a raw, authentic Indigenous perspective on the climate crisis, and presents a youthful plea and message of hope, reminding us of what sustains our existence.

Alan Ereira studied Law and History at Queen’s College, Cambridge. Ereira is a historian and  Professor of Practice at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David (Athro Ymarfer Prifysgol Cymru Y Drindod Dewi Sant). He is founder of the Tairona Heritage Trust, working to amplify the voice of the Kággaba (Kogi) people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. In 1962, he began a career as a radio and television producer, specializing in history. His credits include Battle of the Somme, which won the Japan Prize in 1978; Armada, which was winner of the Royal Television Society’s Best Documentary Series of 1988; and numerous history documentaries. He is the author of The People’s England, The Invegordon Mutiny, The Heart of the World and co-author with Terry Jones of the Crusades and Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives. His most recent book is Gold: How it Shaped History (Pen and Sword History, 2024).

A migrant from Chinandega, Nicaragua, Father Flavio Bravo, SJ arrived in Miami, Florida in 1985 and entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1992. Fr. Bravo graduated from Saint Louis University in Missouri with a BA in philosophy and a minor in Spanish/ Latin American literature (1999) and then taught high school Spanish at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory in Houston, Texas. He earned an MDiv in Pastoral Theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (2005), where he was ordained a Catholic priest. He returned to Strake Jesuit College Preparatory to teach and serve as pastoral services director (2005-2015). Fr. Bravo went on to serve as Superior de la Compañia de Jesús, then President of Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola, and soon after as pastor of the Parroquia San Ignacio de Loyola, all in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Since 2022, he has served as the pastoral assistant for the itinerant team ofDel Camino Jesuit Border Ministries, and as Superior of the Jesuit community in Brownsville, Texas.

Cinthya Santos Briones is a visual artist, educator, and cultural organizer with indigenous Nahua roots in New York.  Briones serves as adjunct faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and as a Visiting Critic artist at Columbia University. She holds an MFA in creative writing and photography from Cornell University and a certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). She has studied ethnohistory and anthropology at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in México and worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, focussing on indigenous migration, codex, textiles, and traditional medicine. As a writer, her texts have been published in academic and journalistic magazines such as NACLA and The Nation and newspapers such as La Jornada. She is co-author of The Indigenous Worldview and its Representations in Textiles of the Nahua community of Santa Ana Tzacuala, Hidalgo, and the documentary, The Huichapan Codex. As an artist, her work focuses on a multidisciplinary social practice that combines participatory art and the construction of collective narratives. Through non-linear storytelling mediums, she juxtaposes photography, historical archives, writing, ethnography, drawings, collage, embroidery, and popular education. Briones has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Magnum Foundation (2016/2018/2020), En Foco (2017/2022), National Geographic Research and Exploration (2018), We Woman (2019), City Artist Corps (2020), National Fund for Culture and the Arts of México (2009/2011), Wave Hill House Winter Residency (2023), Mellon Artist Fellow at Hemispheric Institute in NYU University (2023-24), BricLab Contemporary Art (2023), etc. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Pdn, California Sunday Magazine, Vogue, Open Society Foundations, Buzzfeed, The Intercept, New Yorker, and The Nation Magazine, among others. Briones has exhibited her work individually and collectively in galleries and museums such as Sky Blue Gallery in Portland, Oregon, Latinx Project, NYU, International Center Of Photography, Museo del Barrio, Museum of the City of New York, Trout Museum in Wisconsin, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, and Stony Brook. She has worked at pro-immigrant organizations in New York as a community organizer on issues such as detection, education, and sanctuary and has volunteered in programs accompanying migrants to the courts and asylum applications. Briones is a guardian of unaccompanied migrant children and a member of Colectiva Infancias, anthropologists who work through ethnographic and visual research on studies around childhood about migration, violence, urban studies, and epistemologies of the Global South.

Father Brian Strassburger, SJ, grew up in Denver, CO, and went to college at Saint Louis University, where he graduated with honors in mathematics, a certificate in business administration, and a minor in philosophy. In 2011, Fr. Strassburger joined the U.S. Central and Southern Province of the Society of Jesus (the "Jesuits") to begin his formation to become a Catholic priest. After professing vows, he earned a master’s degree in international political economy and development (IPED) from Fordham University and spent a summer working for Jesuit Refugee Service in South Africa. Fr. Strassburger holds an MDiv and a Master of Theology from Boston College, and while in Boston, was the chaplain to the Boston College men’s basketball team, worked as a prison chaplain, and served as a deacon at St. Mary of the Angels Parish. Throughout his formation, he has contributed to and is editor-in-chief of The Jesuit Post (TJP). In 2021, Fr. Strassburger was ordained a Catholic priest in New Orleans and missioned to the Diocese of Brownsville, TX, where he currently serves as the Director of Del Camino Jesuit Border Ministries. Their mobile team visits migrant shelters on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border to celebrate Mass, accompany people, and bring humanitarian aid. He also co-hosts The Jesuit Border Podcast, which shares on-the-ground stories and includes interviews with religious leaders and advocates for migrants.

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 English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Alejandra Mejía is an Assistant Editor and Editorial Operations Coordinator at Duke University Press, where she acquires books in Latinx history. Her politics and devotion to migrant justice are largely informed by being the daughter of a single, working-class immigrant mother. She is also the Chief Editor of Migrant Roots Media, an independent media platform that centers the analyses of migrants and children of migrants to unearth the root causes of global migration. She served as co-lead of the Antiracism Toolkit for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in Scholarly Publishing, hosted by the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications. Mejía holds a BA in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Latinx studies from Williams College. 

Amanda Bolaños is the Stanley Hauerwas Scholar and a ThD candidate of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School. Her research interests include offering a real, pastoral, and critical perspective in the systematic success and harm of religion in communities through the praxis of Latinx liberation theology, feminist theology, Catholic Social Teaching, and virtue ethics. Bolaños was born in Palm Springs, California to a Guatemalan father and an Italian-Canadian mother. She is a Roman Catholic who aspires to converse about the present effects of a diaspora space, to offer a critical perspective of euro-centered aestheticism, and to shed light on those who have complex, beautiful, and multifaceted identities. She holds an MTS degree from Duke Divinity School (2022), an MA in Theology from the University of Notre Dame (2020) and BA in Political Science and Perspectives (Theology/Philosophy) from Boston College (2018) where she received the George F. and Jean M. Bemis Award. Bolaños currently serves as the Young Adult Minister at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, NC.

Dr. Marlene Mayra Ferreras is assistant professor of practical theology at the HMS Richards Divinity School at La Sierra University (2017), where she also received BA degrees in Religious Studies and Spanish (2003). Dr. Ferreras’ academic interests intersect social science and theology. She studies the strategies women use to resist systems of violence and oppression for the purpose of providing spiritual care that assists women in identifying and developing preferred futures. Her research on decolonial approaches in care and counseling with working-class Latinx women focuses on the identity and eschatology of Indigenous female maquila workers in Yucatan, Mexico. Dr. Ferreras’ recent book Insurrectionist Wisdoms: Toward a North American Indigenized Pastoral Theology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) won the 2023 national HTI Book Prize. Awards granted also include the Wills and Dorothy Fisher Award (Claremont School of Theology, 2018), the Forum for Theological Exploration Doctoral Fellowships (2015, 2017) and a HTI Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (Princeton, 2017). She holds a PhD in practical theology: spiritually integrative psychotherapy from Claremont School of Theology (2019). Her two MA degrees in theology are from Claremont School of Theology (2019) and Fuller Theological Seminary (2012), with an emphasis in biblical studies. She also received an MS in Marital and Family Therapy from Loma Linda University (2011). The daughter of a Cuban refugee single-mother, Dr. Ferreras was born and raised in southern California. She is an ordained Seventh-day Adventist minister with fourteen years experience in pastoral ministry, serving communities around Loma Linda, California, as well as a registered associate marriage and family therapist with the California Board of Behavioral Sciences.

Jacob Leal, a PhD candidate in Constructive Theology at Boston University, is a Texas-born Mexican-American whose research is influenced by ancestral veneration of what remains in the afterlife of colonial trauma, in both Mexican culture and Mexican people. Leal holds an MTS from Duke University Divinity School and a BA from Vanguard University of Southern California. Rooted in precolonial Indigenous cultures and how Indigenous ancestors haunt structures of coloniality, his interest in Mexican ancestral understandings seeks to offer important contributions to Constructive Theology. Leal’s research employs liberation theologies, decolonial theory, and trauma studies to explore the continuing presence of our ancestors. As such, the influence of his abuela‘s stories of visitations from deceased loved ones is a force toward his precolonial understanding of time, space, and death. Leal hopes to expose negative Western labels of ancestral visitations, which deem interactions with the dead taboo. His passion for theological research and training simultaneously realizes the importance of creating inclusive academic spaces and opportunities for Latines and marginalized voices, like his abuela, to tell their stories.

ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections: the eaters of flowers (Saddle Road Press, 2024); FirstPoems (Flowersong Press, 2021); CUICACALLI/House of Song (Saddle Road Press, 2019); Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016); and furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010). Her two chapbooks are Hibiscus Tacos (Alabrava Press, 2021) and Enduring Azucares (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). ire’ne recently released her first comic book, VENDAVAL (Chispa Imprint of Scout Comics, 2024). She is the recipient of a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. Her short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013), won the Premio Aztlán and the short story collection, the light of your body, will be published by Arte Publico Press in spring 2025. ire’ne is currently a Writer at Large for Texas Highways Magazine.

Anthony Trujillo is a member of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, one of the six Tewa-speaking pueblos in the upper Rio Grande Valley. As a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University, Trujillo works at the confluence of Native American and Indigenous Studies, history, religious studies, anthropology, and the arts. His research attunes to the bio/geo-graphic manifestations of Indigenous engagement with – and resistance to – colonial/imperial religious, political, and economic systems, largely in the context of 18th and 19th century North America, but also draws connections with contemporary Native nations and descendent communities. From a political and geographic angle, Trujillo seeks to discern the competing sources and configurations of sovereignty. He is also keenly interested in how creative expression—music, visual art, oratory, and literature—become vital avenues through which Indigenous peoples and people of color can move beyond constraints placed on their bodies, form intimate relationships of exchange among diverse communities, and maintain spaces and practices of belonging. Trujillo’s revitalizing practices include music, photography, writing, deserts, forests, bodies of water, the night sky, and cooking. He received an MA in History from Harvard University (2023), an MDiv from Yale University (2019), and a BA in Music Performance from Seattle Pacific University (2002).

Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato is a Xicana, born and raised in Colorado. Mendoza is the daughter and descendant of Mexican migrant farm workers and white settler ranchers. She is a doctoral student in the Committee for the Study of Religion at Harvard University with a focus on Latin American and Caribbean traditions, and a 2023 Ford PreDoctoral Fellow. Mendoza’s scholarship centers Indigenous philosophy, material religion, and ritual survivance pertaining to kinship among humans, plants, animals, ancestors, ancestral belongings, and land. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges ancient Mesoamerican materials and cosmovision with critical theory from Indigenous, Mexican, and Chicanx communities. She was a 2022 Summer Pre-Columbian Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and a Graduate Student Associate at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Mendoza is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School (MDiv, 2023) and the University of Oregon (2014) with honors and bachelor degrees in Political Science and Spanish. In addition to her academic research, she has professional experience working in community organizing, advocacy, education, and storytelling.

Grace Loh Prasad is the author of The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, 2024), her debut memoir. Prasad has been named a finalist for both the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Series. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Longreads, The Offing, Hyperallergic, Guernica, Literary Hub, Catapult, KHÔRA, and elsewhere. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and Seventeen Syllables, an Asian American Pacific Islanders writers collective. Prasad lives in the Bay Area.

Dr. Raúl Zegarra is an Assistant Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the editorial and advisory team at the Hispanic Theological Initiative. Dr. Zegarra has held previous positions at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD from The University of Chicago and holds master’s degrees in philosophy and theology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and the University of Notre Dame, respectively. His research focuses on the relationship between faith and politics, with particular emphasis on how the identity and commitments of minoritized groups are shaped. Awards recently granted include the New Scholar Essay Prize for Catholic Studies in the Americas (Fordham University, 2023), the Max Weber Kolleg Research Fellowship (University of Erfurt, 2022), and the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise (University of Heidelberg, 2021). Dr. Zegarra has authored four books, multiple book chapters, academic articles, and translations. His most recent book, A Revolutionary Faith: Liberation Theology between Public Religion and Public Reason (Stanford UP, 2023), highlights liberation theology’s contributions to a theory of social justice that welcomes the role of religious commitments. His current book project — Sacred Identities: Latines and the Intersectional Politics of Faith — attempts to problematize some of the assumptions of Latine theology regarding the relationship between race, gender, and religion in the Latine community. Dr. Zegarra is a regular op-ed contributor to the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio.

Amirah Orozco is a theology doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame in the area of Systematic Theology, with a minor in Gender Studies. She is also a Doctoral Student Affiliate with the Kellogg Institute of International Affairs. Her interests center on mujerista and feminista latine thought as well as Catholic ecclesiology. Orozco’s scholarship pursues liberation and emancipation of the poor and marginalized, focusing on decolonial theologies and feminist movements in the Catholic Church. Her work is anchored in how social movements relate outside of the Church and why those relationships are important to understanding the role of the Church in public life. Orozco originates from the Border between El Paso,Texas and Juárez, Chihuahua, has worked with Latine immigrants in Boston and Chicago, and conducted research in Zacatecas about the legacy of San Luis Batiz Saenz and Mexico’s post-revolutionary church-state relations. She holds a Master's of Theological Studies from Boston College School of Theology and Ministry (2021) and a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston College (2019).