Jamila Lyiscott a.k.a 'Dr. J' is an Assistant Professor of Social Justice Education. Her community-engaged research focuses on racial equity, youth activism, and the power of hip-hop and spoken word in education.  Jamila is a community-engaged scholar, nationally renowned speaker, and the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom. She serves as an Assistant Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is the founding co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. She also serves as a co-Editor-in-Chief of the highly reputed Equity & Excellence in Education journal. Her scholarship and activism work together to explore, assert, and defend the value of Black life throughout and beyond the field of education. Jamila’s current research focuses on the power of youth-led social research and activism to foster liberation and racial healing across schools and communities. Her scholarship has been published in several peer reviewed journals including, Review of Research in Education, Action Research, the Urban Review, and the New Educator,as well as several book chapters. She is most well known for being featured on Ted.com where her video, 3 Ways to Speak English, was viewed over 4.6 million times.

Esther O. Ohito, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a Toni Morrison Faculty Fellow for the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. Dr. Ohito specializes in curriculum studies, Black studies, teacher education, and feminist-oriented qualitative research. She began her education career in 2004 as an elementary and secondary public school teacher in Chicago, IL. This is the hyper-segregated setting where her curiosity about curricula and pedagogies that attend to questions of justice and knowledge production vis-à-vis dilemmas of Blackness, race, and gender was piqued. She has since investigated related questions while serving as a faculty member and administrator at a range of schools and institutions.

Olivia McNeill (she/her) comes from a lineage of Black feminists and educators in Southeastern North Carolina. She began her teaching career in Winston-Salem, NC, where she taught English and Journalism in secondary schools. She received an M.Ed in Higher Education with a certificate in Gender Studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Leigh Gehringer-Wiar received a M.Ed in Social Justice Education and is currently working towards her Ed.S. degree and obtaining licensure to teach High School ELA. Leigh is an Administrative Associate for the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research.