Liberatory Practices for Worlds in Crisis: 2025 GCWS Grad Student Conference: Plenary Panelists

Join us on Saturday, March 22 for our plenary session! The panel features wonderful practitioners, artists, and scholars whose work spans speculative futures, care practices, and alternative methods of study. Our panelists are:

Dr. Nadia Alexis, Poet and Photographer: Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, The Global South, Shenandoah, Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems, and numerous others. Her photography has been featured in Forgotten Lands, The Southern Register, Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, and more. She has received several awards and honors, including a 2025 Literary Arts Fellowship and a 2024 Artist Mini-Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a 2024 Mississippi STAR Teacher Award, a 2024 Vance Fellowship from the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, the 2023 Poet of the Year Honoree of the Haitian Creatives Digital Awards, a semifinalist position in the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, a nomination for the 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award, and an honorable mention prize in the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award for poetry.

Dr. Alexis’s photography has been exhibited in the U.S., Cuba, and virtually. As part of an Independent Scholars Fellowship for early-career artists and scholars of color, she exhibited at the 2019 Havana Biennial in a show titled The Spirit That Resides, with Carrie Mae Weems as her mentor. A fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, The Watering Hole, and the Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Publicity Incubator, she holds a PhD and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi. She currently resides in Mississippi, where she teaches creative writing to youth and adult writers.
Alison Kafer, University of Texas at Austin: Alison Kafer is Director of LGBTQ Studies, Embrey Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and a member of the Crip Narratives Collective at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author ofFeminist, Queer, Crip, and her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, most recently, Crip Authorship and Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade. In collaboration with Mel Y. Chen, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, she co-edited Crip Genealogies. Her research is focused on disability and queer crip world-making in the contemporary United States, particularly as they intersect with movements and theories for reproductive, environmental, gender, and racial justice.
Dr. Shoniqua Roach, Brandeis University: Dr. Shoniqua Roach is a queer black feminist writer and Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Her peer-reviewed work appears in American Quarterly, boundary 2, differences, Feminist Theory, Signs, and The Black Scholar, among other venues. Her editorial work appears in differences, Signs, and The Black Scholar. Roach’s forthcoming book manuscript, Black Dwelling: Home-Making and Erotic Freedom, offers an intellectual and cultural history of black domestic spaces as tragic sites of state invasion and black feminist enactments of erotic freedom. Roach has been awarded a number of awards, fellowships, and grants, including those from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Studies Association, and the Ford Foundation.
Sonya Soni, Writer-Activist and Prison Abolitionist: Sonya Soni (She, her, hers) is a Brooklyn-based writer-activist, community organizer, freedom dreamer, prison abolitionist, and the descendent of freedom fighters and caste abolitionists in India. From Kashmir to Nepal to South Los Angeles, she works alongside young people who have been incarcerated, unhoused, and/or in foster care to re-imagine public systems rooted in youth liberation.
With a passion for the arts as the vehicle for movement building and protest, Sonya designed and conducted “Policymaking through Poetry” workshops with youth organizers and aspiring policymakers in South Los Angeles. She co-led the Los Angeles County Youth Commission, the first youth-led government body in Southern California to center the voices of systems-impacted youth in policymaking. She helped co-create the movement to abolish youth prisons, camps, and detention centers across the state of California.
Sonya has worked for social justice organizations including Partners In Health, Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, PEN's Prison & Justice Writing Program, and Covenant House International. Sonya graduated from the University of Southern California and Harvard University, and was selected as a Harvard Women & Public Policy Fellow and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Child Rights Fellow.
Sonya currently serves as a Kweli Literary Fellow, working on her forthcoming book “The Gorra, the Gringa, and the Muzungu.” She often writes about decolonized dreams, diasporic longing, and transborder solidarities. She is also a Bandung artist resident under the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Art and the Asian American Arts Alliance, documenting the community oral histories of shared Black-South Asian social movements.