Keynote Speaker

Miriam Jiménez Román is Executive Director of afrolatin@ forum. For over a decade she researched and curated socio-historical exhibitions at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she also served as the Assistant Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program. She was the Managing Editor and Editor of Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She has taught courses on race, ethnicity, and gender in Latin America and the Caribbean at Binghamton, Brown and Columbia universities.  A frequent speaker and consultant on African American and Latino issues, her essays on diasporic racial formations and inter-ethnic relations have appeared in a number of scholarly publications. A visiting scholar in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, she is co-editor of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in The United States (2010), which received this year’s American Book Award.

Dr. Marta Moreno-Vega established the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in 1976, inspired by a vision to create an international organization to promote and link communities of African descent. She has guided the capital campaign for the renovation of the landmark firehouse at 120 East 125th Street that will be the Center’s new home. Dr. Moreno Vega has been an advocate for cultural equity cultural studies and education.   As the second director of El Museo del Barrio, one of the founders of the Association of Hispanic Arts, Network of Centers of Color and the Roundtable of Institutions of Colors, Dr. Moreno Vega has contributed to assuring that the contributions of African and African descendants are integral to the lives of civil society in the Americas. She has conducted research in Yoruba belief systems in the African Diaspora and has organized international conferences uniting scholars and leading traditional experts focused on expanding the knowledge and importance of sacred African Diaspora traditions. Moreno Vega is co-founder of the Global Afro Latino and Caribbean Initiative (GALCI), a former program of Hunter College/Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. She is chief editor of Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora (Arte Publico Press, 2012) and author of The Altar of My Soul (One World/Ballantine, 2001). She is director and co-producer of the documentary When the Spirits Dance Mambo (2002) and the memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (Three Rivers Press, 2004).

Jill Toliver Richardson is Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York where she teaches Contemporary Urban Writers, Latina/o Literature and composition.  Her book, The Afro-Latin@ Experience in Contemporary American Literature and Culture: Engaging Blackness, the result of a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship,was published in the Afro-Latin@ Diasporas Series at Palgrave Macmillan (2016).  She is currently guest editing a special issue on Afro-Latina/o Literature and Performance for Label Me Latina/o: Journal of Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Latino Literary Production.  Professor Richardson has previously published her work in the journals, Label Me Latina/o and CENTRO.  Her next book project examines literature, film, and music centered on the experiences of the hip hop generation including the trauma inflicted through heightened forms of violence, policing and surveillance instituted in black and Latino communities during the Crack Era/War on Drugs of the 1980’s and 1990’s.