a vital gathering place that encourages belonging, commerce, and community.

Autumn Brown is a mother, artist, and movement facilitator. She is the frontwoman of the band, AUTUMN, a soul-pop and ancestral swag collaboration with Nehemiah Luckett. Teaming up with Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards and hip-hop artist Sterling Duns, AUTUMN released two EPs in 2024,The Animal in You and The Way Your Blood Beats. Autumn Brown has performed locally with Aby Wolf and Silversmith. She lives in South Minneapolis with her three brilliant children.

Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Smith teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, and lives in Minneapolis with their people.

Kira (any pronouns) is an emerging artist whose work spans many creative disciplines: singer-songwriter, filmmaker, writer, and whatever else finds them. Based in the Twin Cities, Kira draws from a wide range of influences, blending and exploring genres from folk to R&B to country to pop to find what fits the feeling. Her music is deeply shaped by the poetic structure of her songwriting, with love ballads that often explore sapphic relationships, love, vulnerability, and the beauty of our complexities and contradictions.

Kira’s songwriting process is an intimate one, where music becomes a vessel for expressing fleeting, raw emotions that yearn to be heard. They believe that art can be a means of truth-telling, a space where people can really meet themselves, leading her to create songs that are both cathartic and healing for themself and they hope for others.

Kira has a song out with Huey, the Cosmonaut titled “Caramel Milkshake” with more music to be released and an upcoming short film “Honey Buns and Black&Milds.”

Tarik Dobbs (b. 1997, Dearborn, MI) is a writer and artist. Dobbs is assistant professor of English in creative writing (poetry) at Southwest Minnesota State University. The debut poetry collections by Dobbs, Nazar Boy (2024) and Dearbornistan (2026), are from Haymarket Books. Alongside indigenous peoples at home and around the globe, they urge you to spotlight and support the people of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen, in their collective struggle for liberation.

Yonci (they/she) is a West African drummer, Bass Clarinetist, DJ,  and writer born/raised/based in Minneapolis. By way of sound selection & performance, and the pen/page, Yonci seeks to move bodies and stimulate minds in the tradition of radical Black queers and culture bearers.