Marsha Music is an acclaimed writer, poet, storyteller, and narrator, and is a cultural griot on life and history in Detroit. She was born in Detroit and raised in Highland Park; she has lived in these two cities all of her life. During her teens she was a student activist with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and later, a labor union president, followed by 30 years with the county courts. She has contributed to oral histories, literary anthologies, and films – including on HBO, PBS, Amazon Prime, Peacock and the History Channel. She was the recipient of a Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship in 2012, and was a 2015 Knight Arts Challenge awardee. She has performed her one-woman shows and poetry on many stages, including the Detroit Symphony and Detroit Opera – for which she wrote and performed the narration for the groundbreaking opera Twilight Gods. In 2019 she published her inaugural book, The Detroitist, and she is active in the arts.

Ryan Patrick Hooper is the award-winning host and producer of CultureShift on 101.9 WDET-FM Detroit’s NPR station, and has covered stories for the New York Times, NPR, Detroit Free Press, Hour Detroit, SPIN and Paste magazine.

Alivia Zivich received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and studied at Staedelschüle in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her artwork observes the use of images to influence thought and our complicity as viewers in that process.

Chelsea A. Flowers is an artist and educator who holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2017), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Denison University in Studio Art, with a concentration in Black Studies (2013). She is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022). Flowers’ artistic practice and writing interests explore ideas of “otherness” through a social and cultural critique of her environment.

Precious Johnson is an artist, writer, dancer, and collector. Born in the American South, she began her journey into the arts during college where she undertook a two-year ethnography exploring Argentine tango’s history and gender politics. Precious holds a bachelor’s degree with honors from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois-Springfield. A contributing writer and guest editor of Barbed Magazine, her research interests include the construction of self; costuming and textiles in identity formation; and masquerade traditions, both sacred and secular, in ritual dance practices.

Marissa Jezak is an artist/writer based in Detroit. She received a BFA in photography and critical theory from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 2014. In her work, she explores themes of healing, desire, and violence. Often using found materials reminiscent of childhood, her art emanates a melancholic nostalgia, alluding to feminine youth. Marissa’s ongoing research focuses on illness, trauma, and gender politics. In addition to many self-published works, her writing has been featured in runner magazine, and she has exhibited artworks internationally—recently at Biquini Wax EPS (CDMX) and Rudimento (Quito).

Julia Pompilius is a writer and arts administrator. Born and raised in Ferndale, MI, she has been witness to the flourishing metro-Detroit art scene since infancy. She writes about popular modes of visual communication, from social media to television, and their role in shaping a new media-saturated visual culture. She is interested in fine art—painting, sculpture, photography—that deals with this phenomenon. She recently completed a master’s degree in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where she studied the sociology of art.

Kristin Palm is a writer and educator. Her work focuses on the arts, urban planning and design, criminal justice, and aging and has been featured in The New York Times, New York Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and Metropolis, among others. She is a member of the weekly Writer’s Block poetry workshop at Macomb Correctional Facility and is the author of a poetry collection, The Straits. She lives in Detroit.

Leah O’Donnell is a writer, choreographer and dancer. She has contributed articles and reviews to Dance Spirit Magazine, Detroit Metro Times, Ann Arbor Observer, DancePulp, and The University of Michigan’s Confucius Institute. As a dancer, Leah performed with the Metropolitan Opera, Saturday Night Live, Beyoncé, and more. She has created choreographic works for The Michigan Opera, Wayne State University, NewDANCEfest, and the ACDA Northeast conference gala.

Mariwyn Curtin explores cities extensively on bike or on foot and documents the experiences in artists’ books or abstractly as “industrial embroidery” assembled from ephemera found along the way. An author and editor primarily in educational publishing and testing, she is happiest writing about art. She previously interviewed ten award-winning photographers about their craft to write the copy for Hasselblad Masters. Vol. 2 Emotion.

LaToya Cross is an arts and culture writer and producer whose work has been featured by WDET 101.9FM – Detroit’s NPR Station, Essay’d, EBONY, JET, SouthSideWeekly.com, and blkcreatives.com She is passionate about highlighting creatives using their platform to shift, shape and analyze culture through an artistic lens.

Samantha Hohmann is currently studying art history and literature at Wayne State University, while also working as a research assistant and writer for the WSU Art Collection. She is interested in topics of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as the ways in which art and writing interact with revolutionary political and social movements.

Vince Carducci is a cultural critic and publisher of the blog Motown Review of Art. He has written on a range of subjects, from the visual and literary arts to popular and consumer culture, politics, and the media for the academic and trade press. In 2010, he received a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Arts Fellowship. He currently serves as Dean of Undergraduate Studies at College for Creative Studies in Detroit. 

Ryan Standfest is an artist, arts writer, and the editor and publisher of Rotland Press, which presents satirical publications of a culturally relevant nature. His publications and prints are in numerous major collections, and his work has been exhibited widely, both in the United States and abroad. Standfest has penned articles for the Detroit arts and culture journal Infinite Mile, contributed an essay on the artist Jim Chatelain for the book Cass Corridor: Connecting Times, and currently writes for the online website Detroit Art Review.

Saylor Soinski is an educator in Southwest Detroit. She is interested in the intersection of arts and advocacy, especially as a means for elevating youth voices. She teaches high school English and coaches a spoken word poetry team made up of exceptionally kind and clever students.

Felix Rucker is studying philosophy and science-fiction literature at the University of Michigan. She is interested in the various ways in which technology and humans can merge, and has been published in the arts magazine Contemporary And (C&).

Olivia Gilmore is a Detroit-based arts writer on leave from the city to pursue her master’s degree in History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent’s Paris School of Arts and Culture. She holds an undergraduate degree in photography. Her interests lie in the interstices between art, philosophy, urban design, and social engagement. In addition to writing for Essay’d, her work has been published in Detroit Art Review, Contemporary And (C&), and TagTagTag Mag.

Timothy van Laar is a Detroit visual artist and writer. The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Illinois State Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art have collected his work. He has co-authored four books, including Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value. Fulbright, Yaddo, the Howard Foundation, and the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft are among the institutions that have supported his creative activities. He received his MFA degree from Wayne State University, is Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Illinois, and more recently served as Chair of Fine Arts at the College for Creative Studies.

Poet, essayist, and educator Dr. Terry Blackhawk is the founding director (1995-2015) of InsideOut Literary Arts Project. A former blogger for Detroit Huffington Post, Blackhawk’s eight poetry titles include the John Ciardi prize-winner Escape Artist (BkMk Press, 2003), The Light Between (Wayne State University Press, 2012), and two chapbooks from Ridgeway Press. Kirkus Reviews named her One Less River (Mayapple Press, 2019) a Best Indie Poetry book of the year. She is a 2013 Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow and currently divides her time between Detroit and her family in Connecticut. Photo courtesy of Nancy J. Rodwan

Jonathan Rajewski is an artist and writer. He received a BA in Philosophy from Michigan State University and is a 2021 MFA Candidate in Painting at the Yale School of Art. Select exhibitions include Marlborough (New York), Jack Hanley (New York) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. His writing has appeared in Mousse Magazine, The Exhibitionist (MIT Press), and Essay’d. He is the co-founder of the Hamtramck Free School and co-facilitates writing and visual art workshops in prisons throughout Michigan. He lives between Hamtramck, Michigan and New Haven, Connecticut.