VOICES: a sacred sisterscape - Abridged

V, formerly Eve Ensler, is an internationally bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose works include The Vagina Monologues, The Good Body, Insecure at Last, and I Am an Emotional Creature, since adapted for the stage as Emotional Creature. She is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised more than $90 million for local groups and activists, and inspired the global action One Billion Rising.  

aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 2007. Her poems explore gender, race, migration, spirituality, and much more. In 2018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry, and in 2019 she was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. monet cofounded a political home for artists and organizers called Smoke Signals Studio. She currently serves as Artistic Creative Director, Voices Campaign for V-Day, the global activist movement to end violence against all women and girls.

Cynthia Manick is the winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations. Manick is the creator of the Soul Sister Revue reading series and her poem “Things I Carry into the World” was made into a film by Motionpoems and debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month. A storyteller and performer at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and most recently the Brooklyn and Frye museums, Manick and her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Callaloo, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. She currently serves on the board of the International Women’s Writing Guild and the editorial board of Alice James Books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Liza Jessie Peterson is an actress, poet, playwright, educator, and activist. She has performed her play The Peculiar Patriot in more than thirty-five jails and penitentiaries across the country and has opened for keynote speakers at conferences on mass incarceration.

Staceyann Chin is a poet, an actor, and a performing artist who has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and 60 Minutes. The author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Other Side of Paradise, she co-wrote and performed in the Tony Award-winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. Her poetry has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She proudly identifies as Caribbean, Black, Asian, lesbian, a woman, and a resident of New York City, as well as a Jamaican national.

Dinah Jefferies was born in Malaysia and moved to England at the age of nine. Her idyllic childhood always held a special place in her imagination, and when she began writing novels in her 60s, she was able to return there - first in her fiction and then on annual research trips for each new novel. Dinah Jefferies is the author of four novels, The Separation, The Tea Planter's Wife - a Number One Sunday Times bestseller, The Silk Merchant's Daughter and Before the Rains. She lives in Gloucestershire.