Jon Davies is a Montreal-based curator, writer and scholar. Davies has worked as Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries, and curated independent projects. His writing on film, video and contemporary art has been widely published. He is the author of Trash: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009) and editor of Colin Campbell: More Voice-Over (Concordia University Press, 2021). He received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University and his dissertation is titled “The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945-1995.”

Nalo Hopkinson is Professor of Creative Writing at UBC. She grew up in Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and the US before her family moved to Canada. She writes science fiction and fantasy, exploring their potential for centring non-normative voices and experiences. Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest (1998). She has published six novels and numerous short stories. Her writing has received the John W. Campbell Award, Locus Magazine’s Best First Novel Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the World Fantasy Award, the Andre Norton (Nebula) Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, the Inkpot Award, the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Award and Canada’s Prix/Aurora Award. Hopkinson has been a Writer-in-Residence a number of times at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshops in San Diego, California and Seattle, Washington. She was the editor of the fiction anthologies Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Whispers From the Cotton-Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. She was co-editor of So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction (with Uppinder Mehan), Particulates (with Rita McBride), Tesseracts 9 (with Geoff Ryman), and the fiction editor (with Kristine Ong Muslim) of “People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction,” a special issue of Lightspeed Magazine. Hopkinson was one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in speculative fiction. As a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside, she was a member of a research cluster in science fiction, and of the University of California’s “Speculative Futures Collective.” In 2021 the Science Fiction Writers of America honoured her with the Damon Knight Memorial “Grand Master” Award, recognizing her lifetime of achievements in writing, mentorship and teaching. In 37 years she was the youngest person to receive the award, and the first woman of African descent. She has received honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from Anglia Ruskin University and the Ontario College of Art and Design University.

Jamie Parra is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. His writing has appeared in J19, Novel and American Literary History. He is currently working on Sky Water, a book about slavery, visual culture, and literary form in 19^th-century US literature.

Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the Belkin. Inaugurating this position at the Belkin, Rosenblum’s role is to develop programs that increase myriad forms of civic and academic engagement at UBC, the wider Vancouver community and beyond. Rosenblum received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014). Her research interests include issues in contemporary art and museum theory, discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative and performativity. Her teaching covers the 17th to the 21st centuries. She remains active in professional associations related to academic museums and cultural studies, attending international conferences and workshops, and recently completing two terms (six years) on the Board of Directors at the Western Front, Vancouver, including serving as Board President. At UBC, Rosenblum is an Affiliate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.