TREVA B. LINDSEY

April 21, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Iyabo Lawal

Black Feminist Historian · Founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at Ohio State University
Author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women & The Struggle for Justice

We have to be unwavering in our commitment to principles of justice and freedom and be harbingers of hope. So for me, this is a lifelong thing, and I think of it as ancestor work that I one day will be somebody's ancestor, and I want them to be proud of the work that we did to give them a world that’s a little better of an inheritance than the world that I was born into. And I think that is how we mark progress in more nuanced ways, in more honest ways. It doesn't need to be a straight line towards freedom, more of a journey with wins and losses, setbacks and victories.

April 05, 2022

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

April 05, 2022/ Interviewed by Sorella Lark

Lambda Literary Award Winning Author of In the Dream House & Her Body and Other Parties

I would say that I write liminal fantasy. I write surrealist work and literary fiction. I write horror. Horror is probably the genre that speaks to me the most. I feel horror is the genre that I feel the most affinity towards. For me, that is the sweet spot where the beautiful and the grotesque meet each other. It's very interesting to me, and I think encouraging people to look at certain ideas that are horrifying, making them beautiful and interesting, that intersection of beauty and pain, humor and darkness, it’s the most interesting place.

March 29, 2022

MARYBETH GASMAN

March 29, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Dayana Gonzalez

Author of Doing the Right Thing: How to End Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring
Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice & Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions

We all have things to learn when it comes to these diversity-related issues or issues of identity. We have so much to learn. Just because, let's say, you’re a person of color, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to be accepting of transgender individuals. You might have some real hangups. Or you could be transgender and have some hangups around people of color, all around the spectrum. You can be a woman who doesn't support women. You can be a woman who doesn't support women trans-women. There are all of these kinds of things that I think we have to be open to, and we have to be open to learning and also open to making mistakes because sometimes people are going to make mistakes around these issues.

March 24, 2022

ALI SCHOUTEN

March 24, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Katherine Ritter

Emmy-Nominated Showrunner, Executive Producer & Writer of iCarly

What we deal more in the second season with how your online persona and your real-life persona sometimes can't help but be at odds with one another. In the first episode back we get into how women are treated, how women in relationships are treated online. In a later episode, we deal with how women are or are not allowed to express their anger online as content creators. So it’s something we talked a lot about in the room. That fracturing of self, that even in a goofy show that's very lighthearted and entertaining, it’s something that we do discuss and try to sneak little tidbits in there.