Hilary Goldberg is a filmmaker, poet, writer, and spoken-word performer. Her films and music videos—including in the Spotlight, Beyond Lovely, Transliminal Criminal, and Katastrophe’s Big Deal—have been screened in venues ranging from the American Cinematheque in Hollywood to the Women Make Waves Festival in Taiwan. Her work has been screened at numerous festivals, including Outfest, Frameline, Reel Women International, and LGBT film festivals around the world.
Jessica Hoffmann is a coeditor/copublisher of make/shift, a freelance writer and editor, and an activist. Her writing has appeared in publications including ColorLines, Alternet, Bitch, and the anthologies We Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. In 2008, Utne named her one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."
Tara Betts is the author of the book Arc and Hue. Tara is a lecturer in creative writing at Rutgers University and a Cave Canem fellow. Tara’s poetry and prose has appeared in various journals and anthologies, such as Crab Orchard Review, PMS, Meridians, Gather
Tyrone Boucher writes about the personal politics of resisting capitalism at Enough.
Irina Contreras is a Pacoima girl at heart. Her work as an interdisciplinary artist, fake academic, and writer engages language, public sites, and info dispersal. She has performed, lectured, and curated about the United States and is headed to present at Ibero-America 2010. She has participated as a resident artist at PA 61 in Mexico City and Kala Art Institute to further hone in on her research around immigration law, cultural travel, privilege, and appropriation.
Mariana Ruiz Firmat is a poet and non-fiction writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Eleven years ago she rode her bicycle from Portland, Oregon, to Washington, D.C., and has been living in New York ever since. She is the editor and founder of 3SadTigers Press, a small press focusing on publishing work by women and people of color. Mariana is a former union organizer, and is committed to progressive social-justice work. Mariana is a gardener, reformed athiest, and former Politics coeditor at Clamor Magazine.
Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia is a cofounder of POOR Magazine, a member of the welfareQueens, and author of the novel Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America.
Maribel Gomez is a labor organizer and an organizer with the Portland Central America Solidarity Committee.
Che Gossett is an activist who has been involved in prison abolitionist political formations and LGBTQ struggles for self determination. In Philly, Che is part of the Hearts on a Wire collective and is putting together a zine about trans justice and AIDS activism centering trans and gender-nonconforming people of color and working on a book project.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black trouble maker. She is the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press, instigator of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Educational Movement, and co-creator of the Queer Black MobileHomeComing Project. In other words, Alexis is an itinerant Black Feminist Evangelist praising the name of the (Audre) Lorde far and wide.
Byron Jose is a performance artist, educator, writer, and creator of Tranza. As an immigrant in Los Angeles, he engages in various endeavors to deconstruct, divert, and dictate norms, situations, vices, and discourse. Through his work, he presents byproducts struggling to be free. He uses video projections, his body, and ordinary occurrences in order to create pieces that combat monotonous expectations of art, while disregarding processes and form.
Kai Kohlsdorf loves talking about sex, and has made it his life goal to talk about sex as much as humanly possible. Kai is a community organizer and activist, former drag performer, and teacher.
Jessica Lawless is a video artist, writer, educator, and activist currently based in Santa Fe.Little Light is a writer, performer, and activist who blogs at http://takingsteps.blogspot.com.
Courtney Desiree Morris is a community organizer and writer living in Bluefields, Nicaragua, and Austin, Texas. She is a doctoral candidate in the African Diaspora program in social anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her essay "Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements" appeared in make/shift no. 7.
Lenelle Moïse is an award-winning poet, playwright, essayist, composer, and nationally touring performance artist. She creates intimate, fiery, politicized, texts about the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, spirituality, culture, and resistance. Equipped with an MFA from Smith College, Moïse has been a guest artist at the United Nations, the Culture Project, the Louisiana Superdome, the Omega Institute, and dozens of theatres, colleges, and conferences across the United States and Canada. Her critically acclaimed off-Broadway play, Expatriate, inspired her second CD, The Expatriate Amplification Project, an all-vocal, poly-rhythmic, urban fusion of jazz, funk, and soul. Moïse's writing is published in a number of anthologies, including Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, We Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, and Brassage: An Anthology of Poems by Haitian Women. She is the 2010 recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry and the 2010-2012 Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.
Adele "bo-dee-qua" Nieves is a Nuyorican who relocated to Detroit three years ago. Most recently, she was the National Communications Coordinator for the second United States Social Forum. She is also an independent journalist, media activist, and emerging poet. She is passionate about working in non-traditional mediums because it is where she feels she can inspire the most change. In between her efforts at transforming the world, she can be found searching for a home-cooked Caribbean meal.
Maegan la Mamita Mala Ortiz is a Queens, NYC-born and bred single mami poeta, blogger, freelance writer, activista, and twitterputa. For the past five years she has helped edit VivirLatino.com, featuring commentary on Latino politics and culture. Her political writings, poetic puterias y otras desmadres have gotten her to say "presente" in the SPEAK! Radical Women of Color spoken-word CD, make/shift, Latina, HITN, the New York Daily News Viva!, NPR, Hispanic PANIC!, A.M. NY, and, most recently, at El Museo del Barrio. She lives with her two hijas in Casa Mala in a land called the mami'hood nestled somewhere between Bayamon y Bushwock and broadcasts her puterias at lamamitamala.com and on Twitter (@mamitamala).
Piece has been writing poetry and performing her work publicly since the beginning of Seattle's slam-poetry movement. In 2000 and 2001 she earned a place on the Seattle Poetry Slam Team to compete in the National Poetry Slam competition, and she was crowned the Seattle Grand Slam Champion for 2004-2005. Her unique delivery and lyrical content is integrated with vintage jazz and Hip Hop.
Jules Rosskam is a trans filmmaker, artist, educator, and activist. His films include against a trans narrative and transparent. He is currently working on Transfeminism, a documentary about four transgender women working for social and economic justice.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer Sri Lankan writer, poet, and educator. The co-founder of Mangos With Chili, she is the author of Consensual Genocide and a co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011).
Fabiola Sandoval has been contributing to make/shift in various capacities since the beginning – from posing for cover shots to helping with mailings to writing. She has also contributed to the forthcoming anthologies Don't Leave Your Friends Behind (a guide to supporting parents' involvements in social-justice movements) and This Bridge Called My Baby.
The Lower East Side Biography Project was created in 1999 by performance artist Penny Arcade and video producer Steve Zehentner amid rapid gentrification of the neighborhood. Funded by Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a video and editing training program gave LES artists access to technological tools that could help them stay afloat as their neighborhood, long the realm of the disenfranchised and dispossessed, became the happy stomping grounds of people of educational and financial privilege. Penny Arcade envisioned the LES Biography Project as a way to collect source material for an oral biography of long-term neighborhood artists, activists, and neighborhood leaders that reflected the diversity that the LES has long cradled. LES has been an area where the political activist lived side by side with the artist, the working poor, the drug addict, the intellectual, and others. Since its inception in 1999, the LES Biography Project has trained 40 individuals, completed 40 1/2 hour programs for MNN, and shot 60 biographical interviews and dozens of live events. Excerpts from this extensive footage will be screened as part of Makeshift Reclamation.
Timmy Straw's first album, State Parks, is out now.
tk (tanya karakashian) tunchez is the founder of the blog To Tell You the Truth and of The New Mythos Project. She is committed to using multimedia that supports healing through truth telling for liberation, and has been focusing her current work on border dwellers/crossers, intersectional movement builders, queerfemmedivas, welfare queens, radical m/others (self-identified single, teen, and welfare mamaz), mamaz, and community caregivers. She is the m/other of two fierce young people who teach her and grow with her daily.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of the novel So Many Ways to Sleep Badly and the editor of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Mattilda is also the reviews editor and a columnist at make/shift.
Anastacia Tolbert is a multifarious mix of grit, sunshine, alphabet juice, and butterflies. She is a writer, performance artist, documentarian, teacher, and workshop facilitator.
Posts
