Báyò Akómoláfé, PhD, rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi and the grateful life-partner to EJ, as well as a son and a brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled "trans-public" intellectual, and essayist, he is the author of two books: These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home and We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak! (with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye). Akómoláfé is the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene that seeks to convene new kinds of responsivities, sensuous solidarities, and experimental practices for a posthumanist parapolitics. Akómoláfé currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, and was recently appointed the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota (beginning in fall 2025). He is also the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California (Berkeley); the inaugural W. E. B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence for Trans-Public Intellectualism at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics; and the inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute. Akómoláfé lives between Chennai, India and Great Barrington, Massachusetts with his family. He considers Brazil to be his spiritual home.
Eden Pearlstein is a multimedia language-artist and cofounder of Ayin Press. He is the author of Nothing Is for Everyone: Poems, a creative contributor to SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger, and coauthor/editor of the chapbook In/Flux: On Influence, Inspiration, Transmission, and Transformation. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children.
Krista Dragomer is a Brooklyn-based artist working in visual art, text, and sound. She is the inaugural Vunja Artist-in-Residence for Báyò Akómoláfé's organization Dancing with Mountains. A selection of her drawings is included in Dr. Beatrice Marovich's Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying and in the forthcoming anthology For The Wild.
