Nicole Berland is a scholar and educator living in Carrboro, North Carolina. She has a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in English, Psychology, and Plan II Liberal Arts Honors from the University of Texas. She has taught courses in film, literature, media studies, rhetoric and composition, and liberal studies at Roosevelt University and UNC. She has also organized community-based social justice reading groups in Austin, Chicago, and the Research Triangle. Her writing on science fiction, fantasy, television, and social justice has appeared in Strange Horizons, PopMatters, The Carolina Quarterly, INDY Week, The Anarres Project, and other publications. In her free time, Nicole also works as an analog and digital collage artist.

Victoria Bouloubasis is an award-winning journalist, food writer and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. Her work aims to dispel myths about the Global South—its people and places—against the backdrop of complex social, political and personal histories. She often tells stories at the intersection of food, labor and im/migration. A working journalist since 2008, Victoria has reported from the rural U.S. South and Midwest, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Greece. She is based in Durham, N.C., where she deejays with the Mamis & the Papis DJ collective. Victoria has a master's degree from the Folklore program in American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill (2016). She graduated from UNC's School of Journalism (2005) with a second B.A. in Spanish language. She has taught classes at UNC-Chapel Hill on food studies, American studies and community journalism and regularly guest lectures in university classrooms.

Leigh Campoamor is a Durham, NC-based cultural anthropologist whose research connects global political-economic processes to the everyday lives of people in Latin American cities through historically grounded ethnography. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University with certificates in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Feminist Studies. She has taught at Duke University as well as small liberal arts colleges including Lafayette and Bryn Mawr. Leigh’s research was inspired two decades ago by Peru’s Working Children’s Movement, an organization with which she continues to collaborate. She is currently writing a book, Public Childhoods: Growing up Working in Peru’s Informal Economy, based on that work. Leigh has published articles in American Anthropologist, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and NACLA Report on the Americas, which can be found here: https://independent.academia.edu/LeighCampoamor.

Annu Dahiya is a feminist theorist whose research and teaching foreground feminist and anti-racist philosophies; gender, sexuality, and feminist studies; and feminist philosophy of science. She previously served as Associate Director of Night School Bar. She completed her PhD in Literature at Duke University with certificates in Feminist Studies and College Teaching. Her undergraduate training took place at Rutgers University, where she double majored in Women’s and Gender studies and Cultural Anthropology, and double minored in Race and Ethnic studies and Biology. Annu has several years of teaching experience at Duke University, as well as through the Telluride Association in conjunction with the University of Michigan. Her most recent publications include The Phenomenology of Contagion and Before the Cell, There Was Virus: Rethinking the Concept of Parasite and Contagion through Contemporary Research in Evolutionary Virology. When not reading, teaching, or writing, Annu enjoys going on long walks with her canine companion Milo. You can learn more about Annu’s research at annudahiya.com.

Michelle Dove is the author of Radio Cacophony and writing that appears in Chicago Review, Entropy, Hobart, DIAGRAM, and Guernica. She works in the English Department at Duke University, where she has also taught undergraduate and graduate-level creative writing courses for the past five years. She lives in Durham, NC, and is a member of the local electro-poetry project Streak of Tigers. Links to recent fiction and poetry are at michelle-dove.com.

Erin Hollis has her BA in English from Illinois State University, and her MA and PhD from Texas A&M. She is an associate professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. She has taught courses on single authors, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well as broader courses on Irish literature, disability studies, 20th century literature and pop culture. She lives in Fullerton, CA with her dog, Duckie, and in her free time, she reads random books on science and puts together Legos.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. they have work in or upcoming in Omenana, FANTASY magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, and Baffling Magazine. Shingai's debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive was published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2021 and won the Ignyte Award for best novella in 2022. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts(an Afrofuturist summer workshop). Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.

Jaime Madden studies education-related debt and works at the intersections of feminist studies, disability studies, and queer studies. She has a Ph.D. in women’s studies from the University of Maryland. Jaime is working on her first book project, which argues that ideas about “the future”—and specifically a “better future”—are crucial to how we talk about and justify student debt. And yet, she finds that for some disabled students, the decision to take on debt is more about the present students want to create and less about the imagined good life to come. She therefore writes about debt from the perspective that the present (and not just the future) is worth investing in, and she challenges the idea that university education is a good deserved only by those who can and will be employed and independent. Jaime lives in Baltimore and is really good at parallel parking and napping on airplanes.

D. M. Spratley is a poet, DEI educator and consultant, and Night School Bar’s Chief Strategy Officer. D. M. studied comparative literature and creative writing at Princeton University, and received an MFA from Hollins University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, Ecotone, 32 Poems, and Shenandoah. D. M. is a Cave Canem Fellow and has received fellowships and awards from the North Carolina Arts Council, Chautauqua Institution, Sundress Publications, and Princeton University. She has taught poetry at Lenoir-Rhyne University, the Nasher Art Museum, and the Durham LGBTQ Center. D. M. is the founder and principal of Maypop Consulting, and has served as the Chief Equity Learning Officer for the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation as well as the Director of Programs and Strategy for Village of Wisdom. For over a decade, they have supported nonprofits, foundations, and social entrepreneurship startups by designing policies, strategies, programs, and culture-building initiatives that center racial equity principles.  D. M. is based in Durham, NC, where you can find her roller skating or hiking with her dog, Cedar.

By night, Phil Stillman (they/them) teaches courses on queer theory, ecology, literature, and the strange places where those things intersect. By day, they work as a mild-mannered psychotherapist, primarily serving queer and trans individuals, couples, and polycules. They’ve earned a BSc in Ecology from the University of St Andrews, an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, a PhD in English from Duke University, and master’s degree in Social Work from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They have experience in activism and social organizing in four countries, have taught courses at the University of Chicago and Duke University, have completed a field placement at Duke’s Center for Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation, and have worked at different times as a bartender, a barista, a day laborer, and, horribly, as a freelance writer.