20th Annual Allied Media Conference

Evolve Benton identifies as royal, black, queer and artist. They love using the mediums of writing poetry, essays, letters, and drawing illustrations to heal from racial battle fatigue, homophobia, and transphobia they have experienced. Evolve believes transformative healing can happen through the use and creation of art and a commitment to experiencing and uplifting love. Evolve is the co-founder of Theta Xi Theta, Fraternity, Inc. and a MFA Candidate in Poetry at Antioch University of Los Angeles where they are finishing up a critical paper on “Black Queer Harlem the era of the 1920’s” and their first book of poetry and illustrations. Evolve has been published in the Dillard Review (2008), Trans bodies, Trans Selves (2014) and Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity(2016)., Theta Xi Theta, Fraternity, Inc.

Kai M. Green is a shape-shifting Black Queer nerd; An Afro-Future, freedom-dreaming, rhyme slinging dragon slayer in search of a new world. A scholar, poet, facilitator, and filmmaker, Dr. Green is Assistant Professor Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Williams College. Dr. Green has published in numerous scholarly journals including GLQ, South Atlantic Quarterly, Black Camera, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. He co-edited a special issue of TSQ on Black Studies/Trans* Studies. He is also co-editor of a forthcoming Anthology entitled Black Trans Love is Black Wealth . He is a proud member of BYP100 (Black Youth Project) where he sits on the healing and safety council., BYP100 & Williams College

Dora Santana is a black Brazilian trans woman warrior scholar activist artist who believes in the trans-formative power of stories embodied in flesh, in language and in ancestral energies. She is also interested in how our diasporic transitionings can offer ways of imagining and forging socio-political-love communities. In her case, transitioning between Brazil and the US; between Portuguese and Englis; between the secular and the sacred, are some of her routes of crossing. Healing for her comes in the form of networking, of individual and collective dialogic creation as counter voices to imposed distorted imaginaries of black queer/trans/gnc bodies as a threat. Currently she is a PhD Candidate in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where her work focuses on what she call Trans Quilombismo/Marronage as strategy to achieve freedom., UT Austin