Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from San Antonio, TX, now based in Houston. She is the author of the poetry collections We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). Her academic and poetic works explore queerness, Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, girlhood, loneliness, and care. Ariana is a national collegiate poetry slam champion, winner of two Academy of American Poets Prizes, and a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant. She holds a BA in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin, an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of North Texas. She currently develops ethnic studies and ELA curriculum for high schools and colleges and teaches creative writing to teens in Houston. Ariana has been writing, performing, and teaching for over a decade.

Jordan DuPont is a student of transformation, experiential and embodied living, and liberatory politics. She teaches high school English and is certifying to be a Focusing professional. She has facilitated a variety of containers ranging from People's Assemblies and Tenant 101 trainings, to literary salons and grief circles. Jordan spends her time writing synthesis and research essays, theorizing about fanfiction and smut, and being with her significant others.

Leif is the queer Chicago-based AuDHD artist and zine maker behind It’s Weird Now Press. Their creative practice is rooted in survival, self-compassion, and finding humor in the mess of being human. Through zines and mixed media work, Leif explores the beauty and chaos of the in-between. They view art-making as an act of resistance, healing, and re-imagination. Leif believes everyone is inherently creative and through the simple act of making - holds the power to transform not only themselves but also the world.

Sonya is a polydisciplinary creator whose practice is rooted in living decolonization, neuroqueer world-making, and justice-oriented mutual care (that sure is a mouthful! they are also at times very playful/goofy, and considered by some to be hilarious) A white settler of irish, germanic bukovinian ancestry Sonya currently lives on and benefit from the unceded stolen lands of the Xwsepsum and lək̓ʷəŋən peoples colonially known as vancouver island canada. Sonya’s practice is an emerging action of coming into right relationship with land, place and time - and the impact that their ongoing presence on unceded lands has on local peoples. As a recovering benevolent their work is deeply personal and related to thier own lived experiences of struggle, grief and transformation. They are a neuroqueer solo mom to two autistic teens surviving in capitalism. Having spent 23 years as an RN working in healthcare (street outreach, reproductive justice, harm reduction) she became increasingly aware of the violence of the status quo and the role she played in that. Last year they gave up their registration as a nurse – but kept all the lived experience with people and relationships! Refocusing their practice towards art, and creative practice she works from a decolonial, intersectional framework that centers relationship and access. Through relational, somatic (body-based) art-making, Sonya's work fosters emergent growth, embodied political action, and a critical awareness weaving the interconnectivity of the personal, collective, and systemic narratives and movements that shape us and that we shape. Sonya has a Masters in Public Health, a graduate certificate in systems design, and has completed their Art Therapy post grad at Kutenai Art Therapy Institute. They are currently a member of the Canadian Art Therapy Association, a facilitator with the Erotics of Liberation Practice Field and a care weaver member with The Liberatory Wellness Network (LWN).

Ashleigh Gray is a queer, AuDHD, chronically ill performer, workshop & yoga facilitator, with a particular interest in aftercare for artists. They wrote and performed Tumours to a sold-out run as part of Maiden Speech Festival 2018, before taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Soho Theatre in 2019. They are currently writing a memoir, completing a Trauma and Social Justice in Yoga teacher training programme, and recently received an Arts Council Lottery Grant to develop a series of workshops for artists and survivors of sexual assault.

I’m a creative mentor, tarot practitioner, and founder of Neurokin Network, a social enterprise offering neurodistinct graduates a transitional pathway of self-discovery, creative agency, and systemic change. I appreciate how Tarot offers a sometimes playful, sometimes rigorous tool for reflection; inviting me into pattern tracking, asking deeper questions, and reclaiming inner authority to live more of my life on my terms.To me, creativity is a social justice practice: non-linear thinking, story, and imagination insidiously and effectively disrupts systems built on conformity and extraction.

Meg Max is a queer, neurodivergent creative care practitioner, writer and multidisciplinary artist. Her award nominated writing has been published throughout North America, most recently in the Ex-Puritan. Meg is the founder of Writers in Bloom, a community that celebrates and centers the needs and experiences of neurodivergent creatives. She lives on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people, with her husband, kiddo, two dogs and three vacuums.

KR Moorhead is an AuDHD and gender non-compliant writer and educator who has been teaching creative writing for over 15 years. From 2009 to 2023, they lectured in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where they earned an MA in Creative Writing: Prose Fiction in 2007. KR also has a Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice and a Post Graduate Diploma in Education Practice and Research. They have facilitated for Writers in Bloom, Beyond Form Creative Writing, Devotion Workshop, Norwich School of Creative Writing, and Oxbridge Academic Courses, and currently teach a variety of courses for City Lit, and on The University of Hull's online, part-time Creative Writing MA. KR's novella, The First Law of Motion, was published in the US by St. Martin's Press in 2009. Originally from Philadelphia, KR now lives in Norwich, UK with their partner, step-kid, and three cats. KR is the initiator and administrator of NQC

Abby Nocon is a transformation partner, writer, performer, energy worker, ritualist and strategist from the Midwestern US, now living in London with her dog Lispector. She previously held senior roles in the digital media commercial sector but left this path due to chronic illness and a call to bring the mystic into her practice. She runs a ritual-driven studio for accessible creative futures, and creates stories, worlds and systems that reimagine how we experience knowledge, spirituality and creative undertakings. A Scorpio Sun at heart, Abby is happiest when she is helping clients and students through transformation and when she's in the flow state, making poems.

Selina Nwulu is a poet and essayist. Her work has been widely featured in a variety of journals, short films and anthologies, including the critically acclaimed New Daughters of Africa, and more recently Nature Matters, an environmental anthology written by the global majority. Her first chapbook collection, The Secrets I Let Slip was published in 2015 by Burning Eye Books and is a Poetry Book Society recommendation. She has performed internationally and her work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, German and Polish, as well as exhibited at Southbank, Somerset House, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, on Warsaw metro and in New York. Her latest work, Drawn Breath, Exhaled Frequencies was exhibited as part of a sound installation at Locust Projects, a contemporary arts space in Florida, U.S. She was Young Poet Laureate for London 2015-6, an award that showcases literary talent across the capital and shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2019. She is also a 2021 Arts Award Finalist for Environmental Writing. Her full-length collection, A Little Resurrection, also a Poetry Book Society recommendation, was published with Bloomsbury in 2022. It was an Irish Times book of the year and highly commended for the 2023 Forward Prizes. Her debut essay collection, Black Climates, is an exploration of Blackness and climate justice and was published by Vintage in August 2025

Ciara O’Connor Walsh is a neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist and systems thinker working at the intersection of ecology, poetic form, and embodied experience. With a background spanning theatre, audio storytelling, and creative facilitation, her practice is rooted in kinship-based, community-driven approaches to social and ecological change. Her work treats autistic perception as an aesthetic and ecological resource rather than a problem to be solved. Influenced by systems theory, permaculture, ecological imagination, and kinship-based worldviews, she creates participatory experiences that invite different ways of sensing place, time, and community. She is currently developing an arts council funded project that explores how living systems can mirror neurodiversity. Alongside her performance practice, Ciara is an award-winning audio producer and writer with a background in theatre, cabaret, and youth arts facilitation. Her work blends the personal and political, asking how we might build gentler systems and more spacious stories in a world that rushes toward the literal and certain. Her earlier life in cabaret still shows up in her current work, in its intimacy, excess, and refusal to separate laughter from sorrow. Her work invites people to slow down, follow their attention, and trust that other ways of sensing, thinking, and storytelling are not only possible, but essential to co-create and imagine into being a future for our selves and the planet.

Erika Phoenix is a non-binary, neurodivergent artist, writer, performer & activist based in Wales, who has worked for many years as a theatre arts educator. They believe everyone should have access to the arts as a means of self-exploration, and through their advising, facilitating, and project planning, they support creatives in making the things that they want to make.