Mahogany L. Browne, a Kennedy Center's Next 50 fellow, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, Rauschenberg, UCross, & Wesleyan University. Browne’s books include Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky (optioned for Steppenwolf Theater), Black Girl Magic, and banned books Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice and Woke Baby. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne currently tours Chrome Valley

(highlighted in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times) and is the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize winner.

She is the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center and works on her first adult fiction in Brooklyn, NY.

Nona Hendryx is a multidisciplinary artist with 25 studio albums and featured on many more. Nona was a founding member of Labelle one third of the music trio who made the hit song “Lady Marmalade” and notably known for her work as a solo artist exploring cutting edge, experimental musical genres. She’s a Grammy nominee and the first recipient of the Joe’s Pub Vanguard Residency Award and an Ambassador for Artistry in Music for Berklee College of Music, Boston. Nona has curated and performed the iconic celebrations of singer Betty Davis at Symphony Space. Nona is a 2023 Open Society Foundation, Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation, Duke Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Creative Capital Grant Recipient supporting the Nonaverse and her Dream Machine Experience, a work in progress being presented at Lincoln Center June, 2024. Nona creates, develops, and presents music-driven storytelling Ai/AR/VR immersive experiences.

Liza is an artivist; an actress, playwright, poet, author and youth advocate who has worked steadfast with incarcerated populations for more than two decades. Her critically acclaimed one woman show, The Peculiar Patriot, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, Elliot Norton and a recipient of a Lilly Award. The play is also available on Audible. Liza performed The Peculiar Patriot in 35 prisons across the country and a documentary, Angola Do You Hear Us; Voices from a Plantation Prison, features her historic performance of The Peculiar Patriot at

Louisiana State Penitentiary (aka Angola) which is streaming on Paramount Plus and Amazon Prime, and was shortlist for an Academy Award. She has developed a TV pilot based on her ensemble play, SistahGurls and the Squirrel.

Liza is author of a memoir, ALL DAY; A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island (Hachette publishing) and was commissioned by The Old Globe Theater to adapt the book into a stage play, and has developed a TV series based on the book. Liza was featured in Ava DuVernay’s Emmy award winning documentary, The 13 th , and was a consultant on Bill Moyers documentary Rikers (PBS).

Carl Hancock Rux (/ˈrʌks/) is an award-winning American poet, dramatist, librettist, novelist, essayist, recording artist, curator, theater director, radio journalist, visual artist, and social activist. Mr. Rux is Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines (an award-winning New York City-based experimental mixed media theater company founded in 1970 by Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, Joanne Akalaitis, and Philip Glass, among others); Associate Artistic Director/Mellon Foundation Curator in Residence of Harlem Stage at The Gate House; Resident artist at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Multidisciplinary editor of The Mass. Review (recipient of 2021 Whiting Award Magazine Prize). He is the author of the collection of poetry, Pagan Operetta, the novel, Asphalt, and the OBIE award-winning play Talk; and is a noted musician, having recorded several albums since his first release on Sony/550. His mixed media works have been included in several galleries and museums. Mr. Rux also created the lead role in The Temptation of St. Anthony (composed by Bernice Johnson Reagon and directed by Robert Wilson), the first all-African-American opera to premiere at the Paris Opera.

Carrie Mae Weems, a conceptual artist, unpacks and confronts constructions of race and femininity in the pursuit of new models to live by. Grounded in the specificity of her lived experience as a Black woman but universal in its explorations of family relationships, cultural identity, power structures and social hierarchy, her artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, fabric, audio, installation, and video. Informed by narrative storytelling, folkloric traditions and the observational methodologies of the social sciences, her approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialized narrative to appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery. Weems takes aim at the complicity of the photographic medium in propagating dehumanizing tropes and the historical omission of Black women from fine art institutions and canons.