Ericka Huggins is an educator, former Black Panther Party member, former political prisoner, human rights advocate, and poet.

For 50 years, Ericka has used her life experiences in service to community. From 1973-1981, she was director of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland
Community School. From 1990-2004 Ericka managed HIV/AIDS Volunteer and Education programs. She also supported innovative mindfulness programs for women and youth in schools, jails and prisons.

Ericka was professor of Sociology and African American Studies from 2008
through 2015 in the Peralta Community College District. From 2003 to 2011 she was professor of Women and Gender Studies at California State Universities, East Bay and San Francisco.
Ericka is a Racial Equity Learning Lab facilitator for WORLD TRUST Educational Services. She curates conversations focused on the individual and collective work of becoming equitable in all areas of our daily lives.
Additionally, she facilitates workshops on the benefit of spiritual practice in sustaining social change.

Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara.  She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities.

Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes. 

In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the University of California, Berkeley.  Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award.

Gabrielle Williams is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Eugene Lang College (ELC), a Leadership Council Member for the Andrew W. Mellon Initiative for Faculty Excellence, a Provostial Faculty Fellow, and a DEI & EISJ conflict resolution advisor to faculty, students, and administrative staff at TNS. She teaches undergraduate courses in African American, African Diaspora, and “classic” literatures with a focus on aesthetics, critical race theories, disability studies, food studies, discourses of blackness, poetics, performance studies, queer studies, and rhetoric. Dr. Williams has a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from TNS, an MA in African American Studies from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in African American & African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley. As well, she completed a fellowship sponsored post as a Visiting Scholar in the Taught MA Anthropology of Food program at SOAS, University of London. Prior to her work in academia, Dr. Williams pursued a long-term career as a Contemporary Modern dancer. Given the diversity of her training in aesthetic and intellectual arts, her approach to research, teaching, and service is community-facing, holistic, interdisciplinary, and social-justice seeking. Courses that she has devised & taught at ELC such as, Flies in the Buttermilk: Food, Power, and Hunger in Africana Literature, Ugly: Distorted Aesthetics of Exquisite Blackness, and, The Revelation and the Word: Toni Morrison & Language, reflect Dr. Williams' fluid disciplinarity. Dr. Williams has directed, mentored, and taught for several educational initiatives geared toward assuring success for disabled, first-generation, justice-impacted, LGBTQIA+, undocumented, and other marginalized campus populations. She has also received extensive training in a variety of approaches to conflict & crisis resolution management for small- and large-scale occurences relevant to DEI & EISJ issues. Currently, Dr. Williams is completing a manuscript surrounding her research interests in portrayals of phenomenological hunger in Africana novels. She is also working on a collection of experimental prose poems.