Experimental vocalist Carmina Escobar is a creative performer, interpreter of contemporary music, improviser, sound and intermedia artist from Mexico City. Her work focuses primarily on sound, the voice, the body and their interrelations to physical, social and memory spaces. She has intensely explored the capacities of her voice developing a wide range of vocal techniques that she applies not only to her performance and creative practice but also to investigate radical ideas and concepts regarding the voice. Escobar completed an M.F.A. with a specialization in Voice Arts at California Institute of the Arts, where she is a professor.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Carribean Fragoza was raised in South El Monte, California. After graduating from UCLA, Fragoza completed the Creative Writing MFA Program at CalArts, where she worked with writers Douglas Kearney, Steve Erickson and Norman Klein. Fragoza co-edits UC Press’s acclaimed California cultural journal, Boom California, and is also the founder of South El Monte Arts Posse. She is the co-editor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, published February 2020 and Senior Writer at the Tropics of Meta. Carribean is the Coordinator of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award at Claremont Graduate University, and lives in the San Gabriel Valley in LA County.

A novelist and an art critic who teaches at Loyola Marymount School of Law. Yxta writes about Community Constitutionalism, Criminal Law, Property Law, Gender Justice, and Law and Literature. She also writes about the relationship between law and visual, conceptual, and performance art. She has published law review articles in the California Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, The Michigan Journal of Race & Law, and has a work on Boyle Heights, the 5th Amendment, and gentrification forthcoming from the N.Y.U Journal of Law & Social Change. She has published six books and won a 1999 Whiting Writer’s Award.

Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press, co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, and co-hosting its accompanying Feminist Keywords Podcast. Her research focuses on the intersections of black feminism, sexuality, and the aesthetic.