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Contributors Gina Athena Ulysse, PhD, Gina Athena Ulysse, PhD is associate professor of African -American Studies, Anthropology, and Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. She earned her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her first book is Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (University of Chicago Press, 2008). A poet as well as performance artist, she has toured colleges and universities with her one-woman show Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me, & THE WORLD. She is a 2010–2011 inaugural fellow at Wesleyan ’s College of the Environment, working on a creative ethnography that explores civic engagement, urban degradation, and the earthquake in Haiti in tandem with a performance piece, Fascinating! Her Resilience, in collaboration with percussionist and turntablist Val-Inc. Daina Nathaniel, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, she earned her PhD in Mass Communications from the Florida State University. Her research interests center around Caribbean issues, particularly with respect to culture, identity, and nationhood. Her primary research area is cultural studies, which looks at the relationships between cultures within societies, issues of power and domination, the postcolonial experience, issues of race and ethnicity between disparate groups, and all the attendant challenges that arise as people try to find a sense of place within their various environments: home, school, work, church, community, and nation. Osunbimpe Abegunde is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Wishful Thinking. Excerpts of her award-winning novel-in-progress, The Ariran’s Last Life, have been published in The Kenyon Review, Margin Magazine, and Warpland. Excerpts from her memoir, Arroyo, detailing the retracing of the Middle Passage routes by sailing from Puerto Rico to Brazil, have been published in nocturnes. Her poems have been published in Gathering Ground, Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century, Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places, I Feel a Little Jumpy 137 138 Contributors Around You, Catch the Fire, Jane’s Stories, Lorraine and James, and rhino. In addition, her poetry has been featured as part of collaboration with LaShawnda Crowe Storm as part of the Poetic Dialogue Project. She is coeditor of a chapbook of writings by immigrant women in Chicago (Jane’s Stories Press, 2011), and a special issue of Black Diaspora Review (Indiana University, Spring 2011). She is a Cave Canem Fellow, and has received fellowships from Norcroft, Sacatar (Brazil), and Ragdale foundations. She has received awards from the Poetry Center of Chicago Discovery Award series, Illinois Arts Council, and the Chicago Cultural Center. She is a doctoral student at Indiana University-Bloomington in African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS). Oilda Martínez, MA, is a graduate student at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She served as director of Adult and Continuing Education Programs at The City College of New York. She has also taught Spanish language and Latin American literature as an adjunct at various colleges and has been a panelist and speaker on multicultural issues. T. J. Desch Obi, PhD, is an associate professor of African and African Diaspora history at the City University of New York’s Baruch College. He received his doctorate in African history from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on historical ethnography, which he explores through the lens of African and African Diaspora martial arts. He has written Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2008). Ligia S. Aldana, PhD, is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz. She earned her doctorate from the University of Miami. Her current work examines the role of champeta music in the definition of a cultural and national identity in the Colombian Caribbean from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her most recent publications have appeared in AHR Afro-Hispanic Review , The International Journal of Cultural Policy, Revista de estudios colombianos, and PALARA Publications of the Afro-Latin American Research Association. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript, Chambacú: Race, Modernity and National Belonging in the Colombian Caribbean. Heather Shirey, PhD, is an assistant professor of art history at the University of St. Thomas. She earned her doctorate from Indiana University. Her primary area of research is in Brazil...

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