Samina Ali is an award-winning author, activist and cultural commentator. Her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), was the winner of France’s prestigious Prix Premier Roman Etranger Award and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. The book, about a young woman’s arranged marriage and political awakening, was partly inspired by Samina’s real-life experience growing up bi-culturally in Hyderabad, India and St. Paul, Minnesota.

At the heart of Samina’s work is her belief in personal narrative as a vital force for achieving women’s individual and political freedom – and in the power of new and traditional media as platforms for social transformation. As the curator of the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed virtual exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, Samina illuminated the multi-dimensional realities of women’s lives to challenge fears and misconceptions of Muslims and Islam within and beyond Muslim communities.

Weaving her personal story with a passionate appeal for women’s equality and justice, Samina’s current project is an account of her near-death experience delivering her firstborn and an unsparing look at gender bias and the crisis of preventable maternal deaths in one of the most advanced healthcare systems in the world. In this memoir-in-progress, Samina describes how she defied the odds by boldly charting her own path to recovery, from relearning to walk alongside her son’s first steps, to retraining her mind — word by word — to write what would become her debut novel.

Samina has spoken extensively at a wide range of universities, from Harvard and Yale Universities to community colleges, as well as at other institutions worldwide, including as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department, a Master Teacher for the Mama Gena School of Womanly Arts and a featured presenter at the Nobel Women’s Initiative 2017 International Conference. The recipient of fiction awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, she has been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, Vogue, National Public Radio (NPR) and elsewhere. A regular contributor to The Huffington Post and Daily Beast, she has written for The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications.

Never one to say no to a challenge, Samina defied the odds — again — and gave birth to a second child. She now lives happily with her husband, son and daughter in California.

Sonya Renee Taylor is a New York Times best-selling author, world-renowned activist and thought leader on racial justice and transformational change, international award winning poet, and founder of The Body Is Not an Apology (TBINAA), a global digital media and education company exploring the intersections of identity, healing, and social justice through the framework of radical self-love.

Sonya is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love (1st and 2nd editions), Your Body Is Not an Apology Workbook, Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!), poetry collection A Little Truth on Your Shirt, The Book of Radical Answers (That I Know You Already Know) (Dial Press 2022), and co-editor with Cat Pausé of The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors over the past two decades, from her National Individual Poetry Slam Championship award in 2004 to her 2016 invitation by the Obama administration to participate in the White House Forum on LGBT and Disability Issues. More recently, she served as an inaugural Edmund Hillary Fellow in Aotearoa (New Zealand) from 2017-2020.

Sonya resides in Aotearoa / New Zealand and continues to share her insights globally as a highly sought-after international speaker, artist and educator on issues of radical self-love, social justice, and personal and global transformation.

Joyful Clemantine is a social entrepreneur, connector, an internationally renowned speaker, and a New York Times Bestselling Author. Her memoir THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS debuted with Crown Publishing in April 2018, and since has been published in seven languages. Joyful is currently the founder of 10Houses, a private network dedicated to cultivating entrepreneurship and equity, and a co-founder and connector of THINGY, an online platform whose mission is to capture, organize, and share creative ways of being to foster belonging.

Joyful lives to connect communities and transform individualistic perspectives into balanced structures of exchange and interaction. She catalyzes development personally, locally, and globally by centering the mind, body and spirit as a site for personal and communal growth.

Joyful provides practical, emotional and mental strategies to rewire habits and make decisions that serve equity in self, the home, the community and the workplace.

Informed by her personal experiences growing up in nine different countries, mostly in war torn regions across central and east Africa, Joyful emboldens communities to bring awareness to divisive labels and ideology embedded in oppressive identities based on class, race, and gender. She invites everyone to bring awareness and action back to self: Who are we without words? Who are we without labels?

Joyful received her BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University with a focus in African and Women’s Studies in 2014.

Known as the co-founder and COO of scrappy-start-up-turned-global-women’s- media-company, BlogHer, Inc. Since selling BlogHer in 2014, Elisa Camahort Page now consults with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and organizations at inflection points when they are contemplating pivots, diversifying and scaling their revenue streams, and looking for better ways to control their narrative.

As one of BlogHer’s co-founders, Elisa was named among Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, one of the most influential women in Web 2.0 and technology by Fast Company, and as one of the seven most powerful people in new media by Forbes Magazine. As a speaker, she’s delivered keynote presentations and conducted high-profile interviews across the globe to audiences numbering in the thousands. A sampling of speaking engagements include: INFORUM@Commonwealth Club, United State of Women,TEDx, DLD Women, SXSW, DENT, and BlogHer.

When not speaking or conducting interviews with luminaries such as Guy Kawasaki, Tig Notaro, Christy Turlington Burns and Luvvie Ajayi, Elisa is working with leaders at every level to identify, prioritize, and strategize their next big leaps, ensuring that they build a diverse, inclusive community and workforce, online and off.

Most recently, with the success of her book, Road Map for Revolutionaries, published by Ten Speed Press, she is working to provide practical tactics for engaging in effective day-to-day activism and advocacy at all levels in today’s gridlocked, heavily-surveilled, and politically volatile landscape.

Kamilah Willingham is writer, national activist, and civil rights advocate. Kamilah’s work is grounded in advancing the rights of survivors of sexual violence in prisons, schools, and beyond, highlighting the culture of silence and inequity that dominates social and systemic responses to gender-based violence. In 2016 Kamilah spearheaded the viral social media campaign, #JustSaySorry. This campaign encouraged survivors of campus sexual assaults and gender-based violence to petition for an apology from their institutions, calling attention to the resilience of survivors and the failures of schools to to submit to basic measures of accountability.

Kamilah investigates the consequences of patriarchy and misogyny, at the intersections of race and sex, and illustrates how our culture, norms and institutions are complicit in this abuse. Kamilah has trained a variety of stakeholders, from prison guards to campus officials, on their responsibilities to prevent and address sexual violence among their ranks and within their environments. Through this work, Kamilah invites audiences to explore healing from trauma as a path to resistance and revolution. Through her nuanced and personal perspective Kamilah helps audiences imagine alternative systems for healing and reconciliation outside of our justice system.

Since graduating Harvard Law School in 2011, Kamilah’s scholarship has been published in Teen Vogue, VICE, Huffpost, The Nation, The Establishment, and others. Kamilah shared her personal experience of surviving sexual assault and civil rights violations as a student at Harvard Law School in the award-winning 2015 documentary THE HUNTING GROUND. She currently sits on the board of the Equal Rights Amendment Coalition and is a mother of two.

As a Chicago creative artist and entrepreneur, Priya Shah is building a network of artists and collaborators dedicated to igniting social awareness and change through art and imagination.

Shah’s ever-evolving passion for art and travel has led her to help better communities in Chicago and around the world. Her volunteer work in developing countries has allowed her to shape her purpose and connect issues impacting youth, both locally and abroad. This has culminated into her founding the non-profit organization The Simple Good, which aims to connect the meaning of “good” from around the world in order to empower at-risk youth to become positive activists through art and discussion. By uniting communities under a universal truth, Shah hopes to bridge understanding across all walks of life in order to bring down obstacles separating us in working towards improving the lives of our children and in turn, our future. In March 2015, Priya was asked to present her journey at TEDx River North where she delivered a passionate talk called “How the Simple Things Create Hope.”

Since then, she has received a number of honors including being selected as an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow at Cambridge University, Brand Ambassador for Marc Fisher’s #MAKEYOURMARC Women in Philanthropy, winner of MADE Magazine’s Impact List 2016, Chicago Women’s Magazine Changemaker, amongst others. Most recently, she is the Executive Producer for a documentary film on bringing The Simple Good to post-genocide Rwanda called ‘Project: Building Hope.’

Robi is the Israeli spokesperson and Director of International Relations for the Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF), a group of 600 Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost close family members to the conflict and who work together for reconciliation and a just resolution to the conflict. Robi’s son, David, was killed by a Palestinian sniper in March of 2002 while he was guarding a checkpoint near a settlement during his army reserve service. Since becoming active in the Parents Circle, Robi has spoken around the world, including to thousands of Israelis and Palestinians, to demand that reconciliation be a part of any peace agreement. Robi was named as a 2015 Woman of Impact by Women in the World. In 2014, Robi was selected by the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice as one of four Women PeaceMakers. She is the protagonist featured in the documentary, One Day after Peace. She regularly contributes to The Forward and Huffington Post, and has spoken at various Women in the World events, Royal Albert Hall with Marcus Mumford, and European, Spanish and Canadian Parliament.