Editors

About the Editor

Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, PhD has been a professor of African Diasporic literature for over 20+-years. She completed her doctorate in English at the University of South Africa. Gordon-Chipembere has been the recipient of two Fulbright Scholarships which has taken her to Kenya and Malawi. As a scholar on African enslavement, she focused her first book on Sarah Baartman in Representation and Black womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman (Palgrave 2011). Gordon-Chipembere’s writing has also been published in Essence Magazine along with a monthly series, “Musings from An Afro-Costa Rican” in the Tico Times.  Gordon-Chipembere’s current writing focuses on slavery and the legacy of Afro-descendants in Latin America. Her historical fiction novel, Finding La Negrita will be published by Jaded Ibis Press in September 2022. She is the founder and host of the annual Tengo Sed Writing Retreats, an exclusive gathering of global BIPOC writers who gather in Costa Rica for a week. Gordon-Chipembere was born in New York to Costa Rican/Panamanian parents and moved to Costa Rica seven years ago with her husband, and two children. 

Edward Paulino is an Associate Professor in the department of global history at CUNY's John Jay College. His first book is Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign Against Haiti, 1930-1961. His second (co-edited) and open-source is entitled The Border of Lights Reader: Bearing Witness to Genocide in the Dominican Republic. He is a co-founder of the Border of Lights Collective and is a board member for the non-profit Coalition for Immigrant Freedom in NYC.

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Smith College and the 2021-2022 Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow at the Latinx Project at New York University. His research and teaching interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. AfroLatinx social movements, hemispheric political mobilizations, Black Feminist and LGBTQ+ activism, ethnographies, and theories. His first in-progress manuscript is tentatively titled Indigenous Blackness in the Américas: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study on how gender and sexuality shapes the ways in which transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent negotiate, perform, and self-make their multiple subjectivies as Black, Indigenous, and Central American Caribbeans.

Dr. Nicole Ramsey is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Her research examines formations of blackness, identity and nation and is concerned with conceptions of belonging and nation across the circum-Caribbean.