Fellows

Staceyann Chin unapologetically identifies as Caribbean, Black, Asian, lesbian, feminist, pro-choice mother, farmer and land steward to Kindred on the Rock in Point Hill, Jamaica, a MendDiGap Connection Hub. Chin's Brooklyn home, The Blackyard, is a safe harbor for many who might need it in the harsh isolation of the New York metropolis and is used to gather, to rest, to rejuvenate, to find security, and as a site for strategization for marginalized folk mobilizing for liberation.

Original co-writer/performer in the Tony award winning, Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Staceyann began her career reading poetry at the Nu-yo-rican Poets' Café, then quickly moved on to one-woman shows Off-Broadway, writing-workshops and performances in Sweden, South Africa, Australia and Jamaica. Staceyann Chin is a multi-disciplinary artist-with a memoir, The Other Side of Paradise, a collection of poems, Crossfire, numerous theater pieces, documentaries, essays for The New York Times, social media manifestos, articles in academic journals, and more. Chin has been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, awarded numerous honors including the Human Rights Campaign Power of the Voice Award (2007), the Immigration Equality Safe Haven Award (2008), Honors from the Lesbian AIDS Project (2008), and the New York State Senate Award (2009). Her One-Woman show, Motherstruck, examined the arduous journey of a single, Black, queer, woman artist, consciously choosing motherhood, was made into a film project which premiered at The Tribeca Film Festival-the audio for which was commissioned by Audible, and scored by Meshell N'Degeocello.

From her very first show, Hands Afire, at the Culture Project in New York City Chin's work has interrogated issues of sex, race, class nationality, and sexuality.

Decades later Chin has expanded her conversations to include questions about 'land and home' in the dialogue on boundaries of belonging-at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, the WNYC Greene Space, in sermons delivered to congregations in Harlem and Seattle, and New York City, as part of MendDiCap Inc which she founded in 2023 to foster belonging for Black and Brown individuals in the African diaspora, with a focus on bridging the gap between displacement and stewardship of land. 

Through the first MendDiGap Connection Hub - Kindred on the Rock, located in the rural farming district of Point Hill, St Catherine, Jamaica - Staceyann is unlocking opportunities for all members of the local community and domestic and international visitors alike, to delve into the social, (agri)cultural, and historical heritage of Jamaica and by extension, Africa and its diverse diaspora.

Chin is also Executive Producer, and subject of the Award winning documentary film, A Mother Apart, which chronicles the incredible path from being a child without parents, to becoming a pioneer in the public conversation about radical Black lesbian mothering, to championing the humanity of women who choose not to parent children.

Staceyann Chin serves as a Board member of Women's Empowerment for Change (WeChange), a leading feminist and LBQ rights organization based in Kingston, Jamaica and has recently begun a co-land steward partnership with BlackWomen's Blueprint in the capacity as Global Land Program Director for the Kindred Sister Site at Restore Forward, in Ava NY.

Merle Collins is a writer of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her most recent novel, inspired by the story of the Grenadian mother of Malcolm X, won the 2025 Caribbean Studies Association’s Barbara Christian Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (UK) and longlisted for the 2024 Bocas Prize for Literature (Caribbean).   

Her novels are Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings (2023), The Colour of Forgetting (2023, 1995), La Couleur de l’oubli (French edition, 2023), Angel (2011, 1997); short story collections: Rain Darling (1997), The Ladies are Upstairs (2011); poetry collections: Lady in a Boat (2003), Rotten Pomerack (1992), Because the Dawn Breaks (1987); a biography, The Governor's Story: The Authorised Biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe (2013). Her critical works include “Cultural Expression and the Grenada Revolution,” chapter in Nicole Phillips-Dowe & John Angus Martin, ed., Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, and “Explorations of the Self,” chapter in Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, Caribbean Literature in Transition. Collins is also producer of a documentary, Saracca and Nation, exploring African influences on the culture of the caribbean island of Grenada and its sister isle, Carriacou. From 1995 to 2021, she taught Caribbean Literature at University of Maryland, College Park. 

Joan Anim-Addo is a writer and scholar. Her publications include Janie, Cricketing Lady (poetry); Imoinda (libretto); Longest Journey: A History of Black Lewisham, and Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women’s Writing. Currently Emeritus Professor and Director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, she is also the UK’s first Black Professor of Literature and the Humanities. She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow. Her most recent publication is This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books (co-written). She is Founder-Editor of Blacklines, the Journal of Black British Writing, and Editor-in Chief of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Black British Writing, 3 Volumes (forthcoming).

B. Brian Foster is an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller working to document and interpret the culture, folklore, and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural U.S. South. For the last ten years, he has set his work in several towns and small communities in north Mississippi, where he was born and raised. Brian’s areas of expertise include the sociology of racism and race, place studies, urban/rural sociology, and qualitative methods. His perspective and theoretical orientation are rooted in the histories and paradigms of Black Sociology and the Black Radical Tradition. 

Brian has written two books. I Don’t like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) chronicles the growth and development of blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta. His second book Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (2024) is a collaborative photo-essay collection featuring the work of award-winning photographer Richard Frishman. Frishman’s hyperpixel photographs document vestiges of racism, oppression, and segregation in the U.S. (e.g., a set of double doors that once was a “Colored Entrance,” the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma), and Foster’s essays blend memoir and personal storytelling with ethnographic reporting and sociological analysis to offer piercing commentary on the realities and histories captured by the photographs.

Brian is working on a new book—Casino Town—which interrogates the cultural, environmental, and human impacts of casino development in the Mississippi Delta. He is also building an expansive archive of oral history interviews and photographs focused on the histories and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural South.

A scholar, writer, and activist, Salamishah Tillet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2022 for her work as a contributing critic at large for The New York Times where she has been writing since 2015. She writes about popular culture, politics, gender, sexuality, and race, and before The Times, wrote about politics and culture for The Nation and The Root. She is the author of In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Abrams, 2021), and Sites of Slavery: Citizenship  and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012). She is the co-host and co-producer of “The Because of Anita” podcast with Cindi Leive of The Meteor.

Currently, she is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Creative Writing and African American and African Studies and the director of Express Newark, the Center for Socially Engaged Art and Design at Rutgers University - Newark. Upon arriving at Rutgers, she founded New Arts Justice, an initiative for feminist approaches to public art in the City of Newark.

Erica L. Williams is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. She is the author of Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013), and co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (2018). She has also published in Feminist Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture; as well as several book chapters in edited volumes. She is currently working on two projects - an ethnography of Black feminist activism in Salvador, Brazil, and an autoethnographic travel memoir.