Notes on Contributors

Rotimi Babatunde‘s stories have been variously published and translated. His plays have been staged across continents. He is a recipient of the Caine Prize. He lives in Nigeria.

Lauren Bajek is a writer, parent, and literary agent living in the American Rust Belt. Her fiction is published or forthcoming in Baffling Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lightspeed Magazine. Online, she lives at laurenbajek.com.

TJ Benson is a Nigerian writer and visual artist whose work explores the body in the context of memory, African Spirituality, migration, utopia and the unconscious self. His work has been exhibited and published in several journals, and his Saraba Manuscript Prize shortlisted Africanfuturist collection of short stories We Won’t Fade into Darkness was published by Parresia in 2018. His debut novel (The Madhouse) was published in 2021 by Masobe Books and Penguin Random House SA, and his second novel, People Live Here, was published in June 2022. He has facilitated writing workshops, more recently teaching a class on magical realism and surrealism within the context of African literature for Lolwe Magazine and an Inkubator workshop for Short Story Day Africa. He has attended residencies in Ebedi Nigeria, Moniack Mhor Scotland, Art Omi New York, and is a University of Iowa International Writing Program Spring Fellow. He currently lives in an apartment full of plants and is in danger of becoming a cat person.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a cherished Black Feminist Oracle and a Marine Mammal Apprentice. Her most recent books are Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals and Dub: Finding Ceremony. Alexis was awarded the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and is also a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. In 2020-2021 she was a National Humanities Center Fellow to work on her forthcoming biography, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. This piece is dedicated to Alexis’s great uncle and all of the nonverbal futurists.

Robin Myers is a poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Recent translations include Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek (Charco Press), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing), and The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), among other works of poetry and prose. She was double-longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry. She lives in Mexico City.

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. She created the serial Ninth Step Station on Realm, and her acclaimed short story collection And Other Disasters came out in November 2019. Her novella The Mimicking of Known Successes, a murder mystery set on a gas giant planet, will be published in 2023. She is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, where she teaches on humanitarian aid and predictive fictions, and hosts the Science Fiction Sparkle Salon. Her opinions can be found in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and NBC THINK, among other places.

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of four books in Dutch, including a novel (De vrouw die) and an ethnographic court report about the “discrimination trial” of Geert Wilders (Enz. Het Wildersproces). Two of their books have been translated into English: Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio, 2019) and most recently Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (Publication Studio, 2022). They are currently working on Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (Emily Carr University Press, March 2022) and a theatre play about abortion, titled “De Foetushemel,” for Ulrike Quade Company, premiering April 2023 at Theater Bellevue, Amsterdam. Van Saarloos also works as an artist and curator. Their most recent projects include Cruising Gezi Park (with Kübra Uzun), the spread of a mo(nu)ment, and “Through the Window,” an ongoing queer solidarity project between Turkey and the Netherlands, aimed to circulate funds among queer artists. They have participated in artist residencies such as the KAVLI Institute for Nanosciences, Deltaworkers New Orleans, and Be Mobile Create Together at IKSV in Istanbul. Together with Vincent van Velsen, Van Saarloos curated the ABUNDANCE exhibition (“We must bring about the end of the world as we know it”–Denise Ferreira da Silva) at Het HEM, Amsterdam in 2022. Recent projects include their role as a guest curator for Rietveld Academy’s Studium Generale program “Refuge” (January-March 2023) and IDFA’s (International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam 2022) queer day. Van Saarloos currently pursues a PhD in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

Diego Falconí Travéz is an Associate Professor at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and Professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

Gaby Zabar is a writer who lives in California. Find her on the internet at www.gabyzabar.com.