A Nation Takes Place

Deep and Breaking Notes by Tia-Simone Gardner. Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and undisciplined Black feminist geographer, committed to understanding relationships between Blackness and landscape. She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow. Her work has shown both nationally and internationally, and her writing has appeared in Georgia, an independently published arts writing journal, and New Suns, a journal published by USA Artists. Gardner is an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.

Thoughts on Engaging Marine Art in Five Parts by Shana M. griffin. griffin is a Black feminist activist, researcher, geographer, sociologist, abolitionist, and artist. Her practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, and decolonial, existing across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, and land-use planning and within movements challenging displace- ment, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. She is the recipient of several awards, including a 2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow, and 2021 Creative Capital Awardee.

trust and identification by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. She is/they are the author of several books, most recently Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, and has a forthcoming biography, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. She is/they are the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance.

Presence, and a Note by Jessica Marie Johnson. Johnson is a Black feminist scholar of slavery and the African diaspora. She is the author of the award-winning book Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and an associate professor in the department of history at Johns Hopkins University.

Cyanobacteria Bloom by Katherine McKittrick is a professor of gender studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (UMP, 2006), the limited-edition boxset Trick Not Telos (Gas, 2023), and edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (DUP, 2015). Her most recent monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories (DUP, 2021) explores Black methodologies. 

Directions in Neo-Cartography: Three Artists by Brenda Marie Osbey is an author, editor, and independent librettist working in English and French. She is the author of seven books, including All Souls: Essential Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), as well as a Kongo-New Orleans opera triptych, including Sultane au Grand Marais (Rites & Reason Theatre, 2011). Her series “Faubourg Tremé: Community in Transition” was a featured column in the New Orleans Tribune (1990–97). She was a research consultant/commentator for Faubourg Tremé: the Untold Story of Black New Orleans (Serendipity Films/PBS, 2007) and Claiming Open Spaces (Urban Garden Films/PBS, 1996). Studies of her work include Summoning Our Saints: the Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey by John Wharton Lowe (Lexington Books, 2019). The recipient of numerous research/writing fellowships and awards, Osbey was the 2021–22 Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellow. Brenda Marie Osbey is a native of New Orleans.

Waters: Ways of Knowing by Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the co-founder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt and is the producer of film projects, including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution (Hulu), which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Sharkey was awarded the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.