Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature, and visual art, and co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Viz. InterArts: Interventions, Body Forms: On Queerness and the Essay the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series and in Letters to the Future: An Anthology of Experimental Writing by Black Women, among others. She is currently working on a novel, The Curator. Bryant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

DJ Lynnée Denise is a DJ, writer, and scholar who creates work informed and inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Denise has received support from the Jerome Foundation, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, Residency BiljmAIR (Netherlands) and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant. 

Ernest Hardy’s criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, the LA Times, and the LA Weekly. He’s a contributor to the reference books 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and Classic Material: the Hip-Hop Album Guide. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award. His forthcoming collection of poetry and short will be published by Writ Large Press.

Greg Tate is a writer, cultural producer and musician who has lived in Harlem since 1984. He was a Staff Writer at The Village Voice from 1987–2004. His books include Flyboy in The Buttermilk, Everything But The Burden—What White People Are Taking From Black Culture and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix And The Black Experience. In 1985 Tate helped co-found the Black Rock Coalition with Vernon Reid and other firebrands of the era. Since 1999 he has led the Conducted Improv ensemble Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, who’ve released 16 albums on their own AvantGroidd imprint. The group also recently launched the band Rebellum, which they call ”our avant-pop splinter-cell unit.” Tate has taught seminar classes for Yale’s Graduate Art Program, Columbia University’s Jazz Studies module, Williams College, and Brown University, where he taught courses on the History of AfroFuturism and Black Science Fiction. In 2016 Duke University Press published Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader.