Voices
Alex Voisine
Alex Voisine is a 5th year PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. Their work is on sexually dissident exiles, migrants, and refugees who resettled in Mexico in the 20th and 21st centuries. Their research has been published in academic journals such as Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture and Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, as well as in public-facing publications like Public Books and Nexos. Alex co-coordinates the Grief, Queerness, and Disability Working Group at UT-Austin.
Gabriel Martins da Silva
Ph.D. candidate in Literature and an assistant professor at the Laboratory of Creativity and Culture (Lab_CC) at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio, Brazil). He was a visiting researcher (2025–2026) at the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France). He holds a master’s degree in Literature, Culture, and Contemporary Studies as well as a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from PUC-Rio, and was part of the curatorial team for the film retrospectives Ecos de 1922: Modernismo no Cinema Brasileiro (Banco do Brasil Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília, 2022) and Do sonho à realidade: cinema e inteligência artificial (Caixa Cultural in Rio de Janeiro, 2025).
Glaydah Namusaka
Ícarvo Carvalho
Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Fellow at UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese. His main research focuses are Brazilian literature, urban spaces, history, and society.
Isabel Ibáñez de la Calle
Mexican fiction writer and a PhD candidate in Spanish Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the novel Los ojos de mi padre (Suburbano, 2023), which received the Roy Crane Award. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University and worked for over a decade as a cultural journalist for publications including Gatopardo, Esquire México, and El Universal. Her research focuses on twenty-first-century Latin American and Latina/o film and literature, examining how coming-of-age narratives intersect with religion, feminism, and family dynamics to shape the experiences of adolescents who have endured abuse.
Jackson Hunt
Jackson Hunt is an artist working primarily in painting. Hunt’s abstract works utilize a personal archive of images to engage with slippage of memory and image construction as a material process. Combining collage, paint and mixed media, Hunt examines family histories and representation through an autoethnographic framework and proposes that a painting can contain history with or without legibility. Hunt is a descendant of the Klamath and Modoc Tribes and is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. He was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and his work has been featured in New American Paintings. Hunt is a recipient of the 2024 In The Paint Artist Grant. He received his MFA from UC Irvine and is based in Los Angeles.
João Pedro Saddi Cabral de Menezes
Holds a master’s degree in Social Sciences from PUC- Rio, where he defended a thesis titled “Horto Florestal: The Story of a Socio-Environmental Controversy” as part of a research project focused on the relationships between traditional communities, environmental conservation, and socio-environmental conflicts surrounding the Horto Florestal. He has served as an analyst at PUC-Rio and was a member of the Instituto Tecgraf PUC-Rio. He is currently a member of the research groups Terranias: Transdisciplinary Center for Ecological Thought and RASTRO: Network for Socio-Environmental Studies and Visual Anthropology.
Mateus Sanches Duarte
Ph.D. candidate in Romance Studies at Duke University. He holds an M.A. in Communication and Culture from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a B.A. in Social Sciences from PUC-Rio, with an academic exchange program at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain. He has developed academic research in the areas of urban studies, image theory and contemporary Brazilian cinema, mainly interested in the archeological dimension of the history of cities, seeking to understand how their existences are inseparable from their images. His dissertation examines the evolving relationship between cinema and the city in contemporary Brazil and Argentina.
Maya Ochoa
Nully (Yai Deng)
My name is Yai Deng, and I publish under the pen name Nully. I am a self-taught painter, illustrator, graphic designer and cartoonist based in Portland, Maine. Working across multiple mediums, I’m interested in how images can communicate complex ideas and create connections with communities across the world. My practice moves fluidly between fine art and visual communication, allowing my work to exist in a variety of formats and contexts.
S.T. Nova
S. T. Nova studies hierarchies of people and their knowledge(s), and the diverse ways in which folks resist hierarchization, in pursuit of full humanness and dignified ways of living, being, and dying. She is a Montessori educator and loves that she gets to spend her time accompanying young people as they navigate, negotiate, and build their autonomy.
Susie Estrada
Susie Estrada is an educator, community advocate, and doctoral student in the Educational Leadership and Policy program at the University of Utah. Her research explores identity negotiation and equity in K-12 education through her Critical Respectability Framework. Passionate about civic engagement and youth support systems, Susie actively balances academic research with local grassroots organizing and voter registration advocacy in Utah.
tofer Perkins
tofer Perkins is a queer poet, educator, and translator. He is a graduate of the International MFA writing program at UNLV. His most recent book is a translation of Llegada del malnacido / Undesirable Arrival is a bilingual book Tofer translated from Spanish into English (artepoetica press, 2022). "A Love Letter to the Great Salt Lake" was published in The Salt Lake Tribune (2021). Tofer has also translated poems from French. Poems have appeared in Interim and Blanco movil. Tofer has given public readings of poems and translations throughout the US and Mexico. Tofer lives in Las Vegas and Mexico City.
