Angela Y. Davis is professor emerita of history of consciousness and feminist studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. Her most recent books include Abolition.Feminism.Now., written with Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie, and a book of essays entitled Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1.
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His new book of poems is called Jailbreak of Sparrows (2025). His previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2021. Other poetry collections include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer with Su Clínica Legal in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. http://www.martinespada.net/
Pamela Means is an Easthampton MA-based, multiple award-winning, singer-songwriter and jazz musician. Protest anthem writing, Biracial, Queer, Artist-Activist and, “one of the fiercest guitar players and politically-rooted musicians in the industry today," (Curve Magazine) - who's worn a hole in two of her guitars - with her "insanely brilliant" (Press Herald, Portland ME) and “stark, defiant songs.” (New York Times) “Stark, defiant songs.” - New York Times "When Pamela Means picks up her guitar and begins to sing, a listener doesn't forget her. She possesses musical attitude and purpose." - WSHU Connecticut Public Radio “If…Audre Lorde had taken up folk singing, she might have attacked her guitar and wrapped her lyrics around it the way Pamela Means does.” - Valley Advocate, Northampton MA