Rena Barron grew up in small-town Alabama, where stories of magic and adventure sparked her imagination. After penning her first awful poem in middle school, she graduated to writing short stories and novels by high school. Rena loves all things science fiction and fantasy, ghosts, and superheroes. Rena is the author of the young adult fantasy series Kingdom of Souls, which the School Library Journal called a ‘masterful tale,’ in a starred review. Rena is also the author of the superhero middle grade contemporary fantasy series set in Chicago, Maya and the Rising Dark, a 2021 Ignyte Award Finalist.

Kyrstin Johnson

Women’s Gymnastics • All Around

Hi, I’m Kyrstin Johnson — a Division I gymnast at Temple University from Baltimore, Maryland! Before competing for Temple, I made history at Talladega College as a 4x All-American gymnast and National Vault Champion, helping lead the inaugural gymnastics team to national recognition.

https://owlsports.com/sports/womens-gymnastics/roster/kyrstin-johnson/18433

Attended Talladega College from 2023-2024. Johnson was the first gymnast to commit to Talladega College and became the first HBCU gymnast in Alabama. She achieved numerous milestones, including being the first four-time All-American and vault champion from an HBCU and holding the highest records in vault, bar, floor, and all-around for Talladega. Johnson led her team to be the first HBCU gymnastics squad to win an NCAA competition, earning first place in the all-around. She also became the first HBCU gymnast to win national titles in vault and other individual events, securing gold, silver, and bronze medals, and was named Collegiate Gymnast of the Year.

https://www.nedavenport.com/about

Nia “N.E.” Davenport is an award-winning Science Fiction/Fantasy author who writes stories that blend magic, mayhem, and deadly heroines. She attended the University of Southern California and studied Biological Sciences and Theatre Arts. She also has an M.A. in Secondary Education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Collinet

M’vam Georges Collinet^[1] (born 1940?^[2]), also known in his early career by the nickname Maxi Voom Voom,^[3] is a Cameroonian–French–American broadcaster. He is known for hosting radio shows, such as the internationally distributed radio program Afropop Worldwide; and for hosting and creating documentary television shows and films. From 1965 until the late 1990s, Collinet hosted a hugely popular morning show broadcast by Voice of America which had over 120 million daily listeners. He is widely considered the best-known and most famous broadcaster on the African continent.

Most, if not all, of his work focuses on Africa. He has broadcast in French and English.^[3]

https://www.bennington.edu/academics/faculty/michael-wimberly

Wimberly was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio during the civil rights era surrounded by the toxic fumes of steel mills buoyed by a sea of blue-collar workers. This is where Wimberly’s early beginnings in soul, funk, rock, jazz, and classical music began. Beating rhythms on the hoods of cars and boxes while dancing to the pulsating music of James Brown, Sly Stone, Funkadelic, and Aretha Franklin…the spirit of revolution was in the air. 

https://afropop.org/articles/michael-wimberlys-take-on-afrofuturism

Michael Wimberly is a jazz percussionist, composer, educator and more—a bona fide renaissance man. His resume is long and varied, including a stint as musical director for the Urban Bush Women dance company, an experience that led him to Mozambique in the early 2000s. For all the music he’s created and shepherded, Wimberly has only now released an album under his own name. Afrofuturism is a remarkable, wide-ranging set of songs drawing on funk, r&b, Afrobeat, neo-soul and traditional West African music. Gambian kora maestro Foday Musa Suso, Guinean balafonist Famoro Dioubate, and vocalist Misia Dioubate are among his many collaborators. Afropop’s Banning Eyre reached Wimberly to speak about the album. Wimberly began by reminding Eyre that the two had met back in 2001, when a timbila (Chopi xylophone) musician from Mozambique, Rolando Alexandre, came to New York to work with Urban Bush Women, and wound up sitting in with the group Timbila, in which Eyre plays guitar.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/20/g-s1-81563/kokoroko-tiny-desk-concert

The timing couldn’t be better for this Tiny Desk. The themes and motivation behind Kokoroko’s latest album, Tuff Times Never Last, speak directly to what many people are going through right now, but also convey a radical mission to choose joy. Musically, Kokoroko takes a massive leap and shows more confidence in the members’ individual and harmonic vocal ranges. On songs like “Together We Are” and “Idea 5 (Call My Name),” they’re simply going for it and nailing it. At the Desk, their fusion of funk, jazz, Afrobeats and R&B offer a magically singular experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokoroko

Kokoroko is a British London-based septet, led by Sheila Maurice-Grey and Onome Edgeworth playing a fusion of funk and highlife.^[1][2][3] In February 2019, they were named “ones to watch” by The Guardian, after their track “Abusey Junction” garnered 57 million views on YouTube.^[4] “Abusey Junction” won Track of the Year at Gilles Peterson‘s Worldwide Awards in 2019.^[5]

https://people.climate.columbia.edu/users/profile/kristina-douglass

Kristina Douglass is an award-winning archaeologist whose research explores the dynamic co-evolution of people, land, and seascapes. She is a 2025 MacArthur Fellow and a 2021 Carnegie Fellow, and currently serves as an Associate Professor of Climate in Columbia University’s Climate School. Before joining Columbia, she was the Joyce and Doug Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Penn State University. Douglass is also a Smithsonian Institution Research Associate and a leading voice in climate-centered archaeology.

https://cheme.stanford.edu/people/william-tarpeh

Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, by courtesy, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment

Reimagining liquid waste streams as resources can lead to recovery of valuable products and more efficient, less costly approaches to reducing harmful discharges to the environment. Pollutants in effluent streams can be captured and used as valuable inputs to other processes. For example, municipal wastewater contains resources like energy, water, nutrients, and metals. The Tarpeh Lab develops and evaluates novel approaches to resource recovery from “waste” waters at several synergistic scales: molecular mechanisms of chemical transport and transformation; novel unit processes that increase resource efficiency; and systems-level assessments that identify optimization opportunities.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/17/nx-s1-5550270/harlem-globetrotters-lynette-woodard-first-woman

In 1926 the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team was founded, more than 20 years before Black men were allowed on professional basketball teams. But this squad composed of only African American players gradually gained popularity in the basketball world.

When their founder, Abe Saperstein, died 40 years later, the team struggled to maintain that popularity. Over the next two decades the Harlem Globetrotters team was sold twice, and by 1984 the new owner was looking for ways to freshen up the performance. In 1985, the team put out a newspaper ad offering tryouts to women.

Of the 60 women that responded to the ad, only 20 moved on to the second round of tryouts, and one of the players at the top of the list was University of Kansas basketball star Lynette Woodard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynette_Woodard

ynette Woodard (born August 12, 1959) is an American basketball player and former head women’s basketball coach at Winthrop University.

Woodard played college basketball for the Kansas Jayhawks. She became the first female member of the Harlem Globetrotters and, at age 38, began playing as one of the oldest members in the newly formed American women’s professional basketball league, the WNBA. She is a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame.