Sivani Babu is the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Compass — a women-founded independent journalism outlet ending the era of clickbait. Babu is also an award-winning journalist and nature photographer. Her work frequently meshes history, science, and polar exploration, and has been published widely in outlets such as BBC Travel, AFAR, Best Women’s Travel Writing, and Narrative. Her stories, as well as stories she’s edited, have been recognized multiple times by the Best American Travel Writing series, and her photographs have been exhibited around the world from San Diego to the Sorbonne. A former federal public defender, Sivani also teaches storytelling as a tool for advocacy to law students across the country.
Mateo Hoke is an award-winning writer, editor, interviewer, photographer, video producer, and bartender. His books include Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation (McSweeney's, 2014), and Six By Ten: Stories from Solitary (Haymarket, 2018). His work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper's, Rolling Stone, AJ+, Pacific Standard, Lucky Peach, McSweeney's, Atlas Obscura, and Guernica, among other publications. Currently, he’s exploring the potential of regional media as executive editor of San Diego Magazine.
Margarita Pintado Burgos (Puerto Rico) is the author of Ficción de venado/ Fiction of the Deer (2012), Una muchacha que se parece a mí/ A Girl Who Looks Like Me (Institute of Puerto Rican Culture Poetry Book Award, 2016), Simultánea, la marea/ Simultaneous, the tide (2022), and Ojo en Celo/ Eye in Heat, forthcoming 2024, and for which she won the Ambroggio Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and the University of Arizona Press. In 2022, she was awarded the Letras Boricuas fellowship, given by the Mellon Foundation, which seeks to promote and elevate the voices of emergent and established Puerto Rican writers. Pintado holds a Ph.D. in Spanish from Emory University (Atlanta, GA), and is a professor of Language and Literature at Point Loma Nazarene University (San Diego, CA). She co-directs the poetry website Distropika.