Novella Carpenter * Amber Dawn * Cheryl Dunye * Marc Bamuthi Joseph * Nia King * Virgie Tovar

NOVELLA CARPENTER
is the author of the best-selling memoir, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, and co-author of The Essential Urban Farmer, a how-to guide to farming in the city. She lives in Oakland where she runs GhostTown Farm and is working on a memoir about her feral father.

AMBER DAWN is a writer from Vancouver, Canada. Author of Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa, and editor of the anthologies Fist of the Spider Women: Fear and Queer Desire and With A Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn. Until August 2012, she was director of programming for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Amber Dawn was 2012 winner of the Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT writers. She currently teaches Speculative Fiction writing at Douglas College.

CHERYL DUNYE is a native of Liberia, and holds an MFA from Rutgers University. Her fourth feature film, THE OWLS was celebrated at national and international film festivals in 2010. Her third feature film, Miramax's MY BABY'S DADDY, was a U.S. box office success. Her second feature, HBO Films STRANGER INSIDE, garnered her an Independent Spirit award nomination for best director. Dunye's debut film, THE WATERMELON WOMAN, was awarded the Teddy Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1997. Presently based in Oakland, Dunye is an Associate Professor of Film at California College of the Arts.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH is one of America's vital voices in performance, arts education, and artistic curation. In the Fall of 2007, Bamuthi graced the cover of Smithsonian Magazine after being named one of America's Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences. He is the artistic director of the 7-part HBO documentary "Russell Simmons presents Brave New Voices" and an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, which annually recognizes 50 of the country's "greatest living artists".

NIA KING is a mixed-race artist, activist, writer, and filmmaker from Boston, MA who is proud to call Oakland home. She currently writes for Colorlines.com, a national racial justice news website. Nia has spent the last five years self-publishing, presenting at conferences, and screening her film, The Craigslist Chronicles. Her writing has been published in Zine Yearbook 9, Race Revolt, and the book Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. Nia has presented her undergraduate research project, "Mangos with Chili: Life-Sustaining Performance Art for and by Queer and Transgender People of Color," at Stanford University, UC Riverside, and the University of Arizona.

VIRGIE TOVAR is a hot fat Latina femme writer and activist. She is the editor of Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012). She holds a Master's degree in Human Sexuality with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. After teaching "Female Sexuality" at the University of California at Berkeley, where she completed a Bachelor's degree in Political Science in 2005, she went onto host "The Virgie Show" (CBS Radio) in San Francisco. She is certified as a sex educator and was voted Best Sex Writer by the Bay Area Guardian in 2008 for her first book, Destination DD: Adventures of a Breast Fetishist with 40DDs.