1. Intisar Abioto

Intisar Abioto is an artist, storyteller and traveler, currently living with her family in Portland, OR. She is one of five artists in her family, utilizing numerous artistic mediums such as dance, poetry, collaboration, prose and photography, aiming to explore what composes the African & Black Diaspora. She aims to spread awareness of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality, who are willing to contribute to the continent’s development and the building of the African Union. Abioto has traveled extensively across the world to tell and share stories of personal identity and collective belonging. Much of her work surrounds the African story of Africans who can fly, who are figures of African Diaspora legend who escape enslavement by a magical passage back over the ocean. She interprets the tradition in a contemporary and local setting, highlighting the migration across national, natural and cultural boundaries. 

Abioto, along with five other women in her family, founded Studio Abioto, a revolutionary arts studio based in Portland, OR; New Orleans, LA; and Memphis, TN. Their work utilizes every medium imaginable to tell and share stories across the U.S. In 2013, Abioto started The Black Portlanders Project, which expanded the stories of the transnational migration of African peoples to Portland through photography and writing. In 2015, Abioto expanded the project by partnering with the National Urban League’s Portland chapter to illustrate a reissue of the State of Black Oregon, a report documenting the economic inequities faced by African American communities in Oregon.

Abioto’s work has been featured in galleries internationally, as well as locally at the Portland Art Museum, the University of Oregon’s defunct Portland-based gallery, White Box and Portland State University’s Littman Gallery.

2. Walidah Imarisha 

Walidah Imarisha is a writer, educator, public scholar, poet and spoken word artist from Portland, OR. She is the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars, a collection of written art that transforms the scars of the readers into guideposts that center them as people to keep them moving in the right direction. She is also the author of Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption, a collection of shocking biographies from the U.S. prison system, which won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. 

She is also part of the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project, as well as one of the founders of the Human Rights Coalition, a non-profit organization of currently and formerly incarcerated people and their families.

Imarisha has taught at several schools such as Standford University, Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon State University. She is currently an assistant professor in the Black Studies Department and the Director of the Center for Black Studies at Portland State University. She is also one of the founders and the first editor of the political hip-hop magazine, AWOL.

3. Emmett Wheatfall 

Emmett Wheatfall is a poet and spoken word artist from Portland, OR, where he writes, records, publishes and performs his poetry. He has written and published five poetry collections including As Clean as A Bone (2018), The Meaning of Me (2012) and He Sees Things (2010). His most famous collection is titled, Our Scarlet Blue Wounds, which depicts the complex relationship between idealism and realism through poems and figurative and descriptive writing. Wheatfall has performed at numerous jazz venues with his poetry and has been nominated for the selection of Oregon’s Poet Laureate in 2014 and 2017. 

He was a featured poet at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the March on Washington event in Portland, where he delivered his original poem, Miles to Go Before We Sleep, which was written for the occasion. He was also a keynote speaker at the screening of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, “I Have A Dream” speech for the Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon Black History Series Program, “March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom Fiftieth Anniversary.” 

4. Jerry McGill

Jerry McGill is a writer, artist and activist born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and currently living in Portland, OR. He grew up in a family led by a single mother, in public housing projects, where he excelled as an athlete and dancer until his accident. He wrote Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me, a memoir about a life-threatening experience that left him wheelchair-bound. The story follows 13-year-old McGill as he was walking home from a New Year’s party with a friend when an unknown assailant shot McGill in the back. Even though the assaulter was never caught, he gave the man the name “Marcas.” In the story, he describes his experience with violence, forgiveness, despair, hope and anger, as well as living with a disability. 

After completing his Bachelors of Arts degree in English literature from Fordham University in New York, McGill moved to Oregon in 1997 where he received his master’s degree in education from Pacific University. After the release of his book, McGill went on to teach at two high schools in Eugene and has traveled the globe mentoring disabled children and sharing his experiences that were caused by the catastrophic event. 

5. Mitchell S. Jackson

Mitchell S. Jackson is a Portland-raised, well-regarded speaker and writer, currently living in Arizona. As a formerly incarcerated person, Jackson is a social justice advocate who, as part of his outreach, visits penitentiary facilities all over the U.S. and aims to record and share the stories of the incarcerated. 

Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years; a story about a son and his mother who is struggling with addiction, won a Whiting Award as well as the Ernest J. Gains Award for Literary Excellence. His essay collection, Survival Math: Notes On an All-American Family, was named the best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Survival Math is a story that examines the cultural forces of his childhood as he takes the reader through the drug-ravaged neighborhood and family dynamics of his youth. 

Jackson currently is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire and holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University. He continues to deliver lectures and keynote speeches in the U.S. as well as in other countries around the world. 

6. Mikai Arion

Mikai Arion is a writer, academic, photographer and filmmaker, currently working and living in Portland. Arion primarily tells stories about race, gender identity, historical geography, environmental ontology and social paradigm. She creates intense commentary about her socio-political concerns on these topics, which she translates into visual creations. 

Centering her artistic focus on her experiences as a Black woman, she intends to present alternate realities that exist in the minds of those who read her work. As a third-generation Buddhist, she unveils pathways and methodologies to inspire the happiness of everyone through her art. Her most prestigious article of art is a cinematic short story entitled Mustard Greens, a story about Black people’s movements and experiences through time, through the context of environmental racism.

7. Samiya Bashir 

Samiya Bashir is a poet, performer, poet, librettist and multimedia artist who, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened and experienced. She is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Field Theories, written through a multi-media experience about the wide experiences of Black people within a prominently white-centered society, which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for poetry. 

Formerly an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College, Bashir worked to create, teach and employ, both within and outside the typical academic approaches and settings. In addition to her teaching and writing, she has served as an editor of several national magazines and anthologies of literature and artwork. In 2002, she co-founded Fire & Ink, an advocacy group and writers festival for LGBTQIA+ writers of African descent.

Recently, Bashir led the Lambda Literary Foundation, an organization that supports and advocates for LGBTQIA+ writers, bringing its essential programming back in-person across the country after the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, Bashir is the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York.

8. Heidi W. Durrow

Heidi W. Durrow is a writer, podcaster, festival producer, former journalist, corporate lawyer and life skills trainer for NBA and NFL athletes. Being the daughter of a Danish immigrant and an African American Air Force member, Durrow’s family settled in Portland, where she grew up and attended Jefferson High School. Being the first person in her family to be a college graduate, she majored in English at Stanford University and wrote a weekly column for the Stanford Daily, graduating with her degree in 1991 with honors. Durrow continued her education at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and received a Masters of Science in 1992. She then attended Yale and received her Juris Doctor degree in 1995. 

Her career began at the Cravath, Swaine & Moore law firm in New York City, where she worked as a corporate litigator on antitrust, commercial contracts and employment discrimination cases, but left in 1997 to pursue a literary career. Durrow was the host of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat, which focuses primarily on issues about being racially and culturally mixed.

In 2008, Durrow became the founder of the now-defunct Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, which ran from 2008 to 2012. It hosted readings, workshops and family events that celebrated the stories of the mixed experience. She then created another festival called The Mixed Remixed Festival which premiered June 14, 2014 and had a very similar artistic atmospheric approach to the previous festival.

9. Renee Watson

Renee Watson is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author, poet and public speaker, who grew up in Portland, OR. She writes about her experiences growing up as a Black girl in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). She has sold in total over 1 million copies of her books and has given readings and lectures at several renowned places such as the United Nations, the Library of Congress and the U.S. Embassies in Japan and New Zealand.

Her stories are centered around the experiences of Black girls like herself and explore the themes of several social issues such as home, identity, body image, and the intersections of race, class and gender. Her book, Piece Me Together, is about the powerful story of a girl striving for success in a world that was not made to favor her. It received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor. Several of her published works consist of picture books that aim to educate and support young Black girls. 

Watson was a writer-in-residence for over twenty years, teaching creative writing and theater in public schools and community centers throughout the nation. She then wrote a poetry collection, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, which was based on the poetry workshops she facilitated in her residence and specifically about the children in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

She founded the I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit organization that was housed in the Harlem Brownstone, where she hosted poetry workshops for youth and literary events for the community from 2016 to 2019.

10. Nastashia Minto

Nastashia Minto is a poet, novelist, and musician living in Portland, OR. Minto was born in South Georgia and was raised by her grandparents, where she grew up in poverty, around substance abuse and family violence. Her life experiences led her to obtain an associate’s degree in occupational therapy and a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Since nine years old, she has found that her writing has offered her a way to help people. Her novel, Naked: The Rythm and Groove of It, is a poetic memoir that explores and deconstructs topics of faith, sexuality, family, love, abuse and identity. Her writing welcomes difficult conversations and allows space for unboxing the uncertainties of living in our society as a person of color. 

She has been featured in many popular local reading series such as Unchaste Reader, Grief Rites, and Incite. Her most recent work, A Body Tangled In Time: A Tapestry of Self-Love and Shadow Work, is a piece of literary art that uses poetry, song and story to share her thoughts and experiences. Her goal is to share and teach others to detangle themselves from skewed self-perceptions and to understand and dismantle old, unuseful defense mechanisms.