S. Bear Bergman is an American author, poet, playwright, and theater artist. He is a trans man, and his gender identity is a main focus of his artwork.
Rosanna Flamer-Caldera is a Sri Lankan LGBTIQ rights activist. She is the founder and executive director of EQUAL GROUND, the oldest LGBTIQ advocacy organisation pursuing LGBTIQ rights as part of the larger Human Rights framework in Sri Lanka. She was also the co-founder of the Women’s Support Group in 1999. Rosanna served as the first Sri Lankan Female Asia Representative (2001-2003) and then Co-Secretary General of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Association (ILGA) (2003-2008). She is the co-founder and former chair of the Commonwealth Equality Network (2015-2022), a broad network of LGBTIQ organisations within the Commonwealth. In September 2021, she spearheaded the first of its kind legal case in the Sri Lanka Court of Appeals, against homophobic, discriminatory and inflammatory speeches made by police trainers in Sri Lanka. The police issued an island wide circular to all police stations in the country that stated that LGBTIQ persons could not be arrested or harassed for being who they are. Through her guidance, in 2015 EQUAL GROUND commenced Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs within the corporate sector and to date has sensitised over 45000 staff members of over 50 companies in Sri Lanka. In 2017 she received the Zonta award for Social Impact and in November 2022, she received the APCOM Community Hero award for her work for the LGBTIQ community in Sri Lanka.
Julia Michelle Serano is an American writer, musician, spoken-word performer, transgender and bisexual activist, and biologist. She is known for her transfeminist books, such as Whipping Girl (2007), Excluded (2013), and Outspoken (2016). She is also a public speaker who has given many talks at universities and conferences. Her writing is frequently featured in queer, feminist, and popular culture magazines.
Terry Wolverton is an American novelist, memoirist, poet, and editor. Her book Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman's Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the "Best Books of 2002" by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her novel-in-poems Embers was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Trish Salah is an Arab Canadian poet, activist, and academic. She is the author of the poetry collections, Wanting in Arabic, published in 2002 by TSAR Publications and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, published by Roof Books in 2014. An expanded Canadian edition of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1 was published by Metonymy Press in 2017.
Arsenal Pulp Press is a Canadian independent book publishing company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The company publishes a broad range of titles in both fiction and non-fiction, focusing primarily on underrepresented genres such as underground literature, LGBT literature, multiracial literature, graphic novels, visual arts, progressive and activist non-fiction and works in translation, and is noted for founding the annual Three-Day Novel Contest.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a published poet, performer, educator, food writer, cultural strategist, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey, whose work has been showcased nationally and internationally. Their second book, More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature Finalist. They are a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship recipient, three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the U.S.
Nia King is a mixed-race woman of Black/Lebanese/Hungarian descent, queer, art activist, multimedia journalist, podcaster, public speaker, and zine maker. She lives in Oakland, California. Within her podcast, "We Want the Airwaves," Nia interviews queer and trans artists about their lives and about their work. The title of her podcast was inspired from a Ramones song and played as a demand for media access and an insistence on the right for marginalized people to take up space.
Marriage of a Thousand Lies is a novel by Sri Lankan-American author SJ Sindu, published by Soho Press in 2017. It tells the story of Lucky and Kris, two gay South Asian-Americans whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka, who marry to stay in the closet.
Gwen Benaway is a Canadian poet and activist. As of October 2019, she was a PhD candidate in the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto. Benaway has also written non-fiction for The Globe and Mail and Maclean's.
Disability justice is a social justice movement which focuses on examining disability and ableism as they relate to other forms of oppression and identity such as race, class and gender. It was developed in 2005 by the Disability Justice Collective, a group including Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, Leroy F. Moore Jr., and Eli Clare. In disability justice, disability is not considered to be defined in "white terms, or male terms, or straight terms." The movement also believes that ableism makes other forms of prejudice possible and that systems of oppression are intertwined. The disability justice framework is being applied to a intersectional reexamination of a wide range of disability, human rights, and justice movements.
The Women's Support Group (WSG) is a Sri Lankan organisation dedicated to helping lesbian, bisexual and transgender women. It was set up in 1999 by amongst others Rosanna Flamer-Caldera. It has won the Felipa de Souza Award twice.
Syrus Marcus Ware is a Canadian artist, activist and scholar. He lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is an assistant professor in the school of the arts at McMaster University. He has worked since 2014 as faculty and as a designer for The Banff Centre. Ware is the inaugural artist-in-residence for Daniels Spectrum, a cultural centre in Toronto, and a founding member of Black Lives Matter Toronto. For 13 years, he was the coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario's youth program. During that time Ware oversaw the creation of the Free After Three program and the expansion of the youth program into a multi pronged offering.
Eli Clare is an American writer, activist, educator, and speaker. His work focuses on queer, transgender, and disability issues. Clare was one of the first scholars to popularize the bodymind concept.
Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, activist, translator, and community organizer who resides in Montreal, Quebec. Their artistic practice moves between theatre, dance, spoken word and written poetry, watercolours, photography, performance, sculpture and installation. Working across multiple disciplines, La Mackerel's work explores their identity as a trans femme of colour who reaches back beyond the immediate constraints of the colonial circumstances of their life to the spiritual ancestral lineages of queer femmes.
J Mase III is a Black trans, queer American poet and educator.
The Disability Futures Fellowship Award is a grant award offered by the Ford and Mellon Foundations to promote disabled artists. Through the Fellowship, the Ford and Mellon Foundation offers fifty thousand dollars to twenty artists every 18 months, totaling one million dollars per cohort.
