A historian at heart, reporter by (w)right, rebel by reason, Walidah Imarisha is an educator, writer, public scholar and spoken word artist.

She edited two anthologies, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. Imarisha’s nonfiction book Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She is also the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars. She is currently working on an Oregon Black history book, forthcoming from AK Press.

Imarisha has taught in Stanford University’s Program of Writing and Rhetoric, Pacific Northwest College of the Art's Masters in Critical Studies Program, Portland State University's Black Studies Department, and Oregon State University's Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department.

For six years, she presented statewide as a public scholar with Oregon Humanities' Conversation Project on topics such as Oregon Black history, alternatives to incarceration, and the history of hip hop. 

Hillary Lazar has been involved with anarchist and radical education projects since the 1990s, and is currently part of the efforts to organize graduate student workers, a mentor and trainer for Organize Pittsburgh, a collective member of the Big Idea Bookstore, and a content editor for Agency: An Anarchist PR Project. She is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches about social movements, gender, power, and resistance.

Arun Gupta is a journalist who has written for the Washington Post, The Nation, Raw Story, The Guardian, and Jacobin. He is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York and author of the upcoming “Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction: A Junk Food-Loving Chef’s Inquiry Into Taste” (The New Press).​

Zoé Samudzi is a writer and doctoral student in Medical Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on the scientific logics that produce race and gender, particularly focusing on transgender health and the ways Blackness is constructed. Zoé is a co-author of the forthcoming book, As Black As Resistance: Finding Conditions for Liberation.

Raj Patel

Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin and a Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at the university currently known as Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa.

He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. Raj co-taught the 2014 Edible Education class at UC Berkeley with Michael Pollan. In 2016 he was recognized with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and was an Advisor to Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

In addition to numerous scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics and public health journals, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Times of India, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His second,  The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. His latest, co-written with Jason W. Moore, is A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.

Following an illustrious career in the precariat and as long time activist, Kevin Van Meter is a member of the research collective Team Colors; with the collective he co-edited the collection Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010) and the collectives work has appeared in various book collections and journals. Van Meter's collaborative and single-authored work has appeared in the Earth First! Journal, Synthesis / Regeneration, Organizing Upgrade, Radical Society, Groundswell Journal, Indypendent Reader, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Arranca!, The Hampton Institute, Toward Freedom, The Commoner: A Web Journal for Other Values, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory and other radical publications. His first monograph, titled Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible, was released in 2017 by AK Press.