Black/Latinx Colloquium Speakers
2023-2024 Speakers: Heading link
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Jen White-Johnson | Educator & Activist Heading link
Jennifer White-Johnson is a disabled and Neurodivergent Afro-Latina art activist and design educator whose visual work aims to uplift disability justice narratives in design. Jen uses photography, zines, and collage art to explore the intersection of content and caregiving, emphasizing redesigning ableist visual culture. Jen has presented her disability justice activist work and collaborated with a number of brands and art spaces across print and digital such as Twitter, Target, Converse, and Apple. Her photo and design work has been featured in The Washington Post, AfroPunk, Art in America, Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation and is permanently archived in libraries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC. and most recently acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2020 she was an honoree on the Diversability’s D-30 Disability Impact List. In 2021 she was listed as one of 20 Latino Artists to watch on Today.com Jen has an MFA in Graphic Design from The Maryland Institute College of Art. She was born in Washington D.C. and lives in Baltimore with her husband Kevin and 10-year-old son Knox.
2022-2023 Speakers: Heading link
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Julian Randall | Poet, Essayist, Writer Heading link
Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole. Julian is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Julian is the winner of the 2019 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle.
His writing has been published in New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and POETRY, and anthologized in Black Boy Joy (which debuted at #1 on the NYT Best Seller list), Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed and Furious Flower.
He has essays in The Atlantic, Vibe Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Ole Miss.
He is the author of Refuse (Pitt, 2018), winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a finalist for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, as well as the middle grade novel Pilar Ramirez And The Escape from Zafa (Holt, Winter 2022), and The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: Essays (Bold Type Books, Spring 2023).
He can be found on Twitter @JulianThePoet.
Kristiana Rae Colón | Poet, Playwright, Educator Heading link
Kristiana Rae Colón is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. She was awarded 2017 Best Black Playwright by The Black Mall. In 2013, she toured the UK with promised instruments, winner of the inaugural Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. Kristiana is an alum of the Goodman Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the hip-hop duo April Fools. She appeared on the fifth season of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Kristiana’s writing, producing, and organizing work to radically reimagine power structures, our complicity in them, and visions for liberation.