Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is a Puerto Rican novelist, short-story writer, and essayist born in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. She is the founder and director of the Cátedra de Mujeres Negras Ancestrales, a project dedicated to the visibility of Afro-Puerto Rican women's histories and creative traditions. Her writing for both adults and children centers Afro-diasporic identities, sexual diversity, and Caribbean experience. She has worked as a freelance writer developing children's content, including the ¡Listos a jugar! storybook in collaboration with Plaza Sésamo in 2022.

She is a professor and resident writer at EDP University in Puerto Rico, where she teaches creative writing. Among her many honors, she received the Premio Nacional del Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña in 2008 and was selected as one of the most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 as part of Bogotá 39, convened by UNESCO and the Hay Festival. Her work has been published across Latin America and Europe and translated into English, Italian, French, and Hungarian.

Dr. Leila Rodríguez Soto is the Academic Director of the journal Caribbean Studies, one of the leading peer-reviewed journals of the field. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology and Demography from Pennsylvania State University and a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology from the University of Costa Rica. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico. Her research focuses on the use of cultural expert testimony as a tool for improving access to justice, and on international migration in Central America and the Caribbean.

She is the author of Culture as Judicial Evidence: Expert Testimony in Latin America (2021), as well as dozens of academic articles, including "From Quantitative Fact to Discursive Practice: Techniques for Asserting the Reliability of Anthropological Knowledge in Expert Testimony" (2022), "Cultural Expert Testimony in American Legal Proceedings" (2018), and "Valorizando los Efectos de las Emigraciones y las Remesas: Una Comunidad Costarricense ante la (Re)estructuración de Jerarquías de Género y Clase" (2016).

Dr. Mayra Santos-Febres is an Afro-Puerto Rican author, poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic and Artist in Residence at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Her award-winning work focuses on themes of race, diaspora identity, female sexuality, gender fluidity, desire, and power. She is a cultural activist who helps to bring books to young readers and the less fortunate. Her writings have been translated into French, English, German, and Italian. Her most recent novel, La otra Julia (The Other Julia) narrates the short and intense life of Julia de Burgos, revealing a new facet of the iconic poet through the voice of a contemporary writer.

She has been awarded international fellowships such as the John S. Guggenheim, Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundation, and prizes including the Juan Rulfo from Radio France Internationale, the Letras de Oro from Spain, the Novel Prize from the Puerto Rican Literature Institute, and the Primavera Novel Prize. Santos Febres is also responsible for the development of University of Puerto Rico’s Afro Diasporic and Race Studies Program, which was awarded a Mellon Foundation grant for academic diversification.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator. The 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, his awards and recognitions include the Premio Nuevas Voces, the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. His eight poetry books include lo terciario/ the tertiary (Noemi, 2019), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds LLC, 2019), which inspired the title of the exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. His translations have won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and the Sundial Literary Translation Award, and have been longlisted for ALTA National Translation Award in Poetry and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Roque currently teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and is the Creative Editor for sx salon: a small axe literary platform.