Mya Jones is the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs at California State University, Long Beach where she will soon be completing a Bachelor of Arts in Communications Studies and a minor in Sociology. She is passionate about serving underrepresented communities, and within her current role, she is advocating for the recruitment and retention of Black/Pan African students within higher education.

In the past Mya has also worked with Guardian Scholars, a program dedicated to serving the foster youth community here at CSULB. She aspires to pursue a career in law advocating for restorative justice and wrongfully convicted individuals.

Citlalli Ortiz is a student leader at California State University, Long Beach where she is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Communications Studies and a minor in Public Relations. Her leadership began in 2018 when she served as the Commissioner of Undocumented students, then Senator-at-large, and currently Chief Diversity Officer for ASI. She is also currently working with the California-Mexico Studies Center, a non-profit based in Long Beach, where she has been a key organizer for three advocacy trips to Washington D.C. with a total of 50 DACA recipients to advocate for the restoration of DACA’s Advance Parole.

While in D.C. she led meetings with U.S. representatives and senators to ask for their support and leadership in matters that affected DACA recipients. Citlalli is also involved with Dig En Español, the first Spanish language magazine at CSULB. In this role, she serves as the managing editor where she is a connector between the community and the magazine due to her knowledge of community organizations, non-profits, and student organizations.

Mikki Kendall is a writer, diversity consultant, and occasional feminist who talks a lot about intersectionality, policing, gender, sexual assault, and other current events. Her essays can be found at TIME, the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Ebony, Essence, Salon, The Boston Globe, NBC, Bustle, Islamic Monthly, and a host of other sites.

Her media appearances include BBC, NPR, the Daily Show, PBS, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, WVON, WBEZ, and Showtime. She has discussed race, feminism, education, food politics, police violence, tech, and pop culture at institutions and universities across the country.

Dr. Alfredo Carlos is a Faculty Member in Political Science at California State University, Long Beach. He is also the Executive Director of the Foundation for Economic Democracy. He is a proud product of California's public school systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine where he specialized in the fields of Political Economy, Political theory, and American Racial and Urban Politics.

He earned his M.A. in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach with a focus in Comparative Politics and International Relations and his B.A. is in History and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2013-14, he was a University of California President's Dissertation Year Fellow as well as a Q. A. Shaw McKean, Jr. Fellow with the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. His articles have appeared in Latin American Perspectives and Ethnicities. He is the co-author of The Latino Question (Pluto, 2018).

Dr. Ingram is a licensed clinical social worker and an educator who has over 30 years working in the trauma, mental health and education fields. Her dissertation focused on the impact of community violence on the academic careers of African American elementary school students. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck School of Medicine of USC; Associate Director, Student Counseling and Mental Health Division, USC Student Health; Program Director, Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention and Services, USC Student Health.

Dr. Ingram was a lecturer with UCLA and CSU Long Beach Social Work Departments and a full and adjunct faculty member at Pacific Oaks College, Marriage and Family Therapy where she developed their specialization for African American Mental Health. She is on the Advisory Board of the African Communities Public Health Coalition (ACPHC). She is a member of the National Association of Social Work (NASW) and National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW). She was the co-chair of the Trauma Informed Los Angeles Steering Committee. Dr. Ingram received her Doctorate of Education from the University of Phoenix, a Masters of Social Work from California State University of Sacramento and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from UCLA. She provides consultations, program development, workshops and training on sexual and domestic violence, trauma and trauma-informed care, cultural competence, to various human service agencies, schools, and mental health professionals.

LaShawnae Smith, best known as LaSpeaks Volumes was born and raised in South Central, Los Angeles and is committed to making an impression on her community through education and her poetry. In her efforts to better herself, she obtained her Bachelors from UCLA in 2012 and went on to graduate with her Masters in Education from USC in 2017.

Now a 7th grade English teacher in Watts, an author of her 1st published book, Naked: A Woman's Unfiltered Truth in Poetry and Testimony, and a traveling artist, she's using her work in different aspects of her life to make a difference and tell the stories that some haven't acquired the language to tell themselves.

For more information on her book, please visit http://carlyleenterprises.com/naked

Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.

Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse University the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. Most recently she spent fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness – an interdisciplinary Ph.D program – and of Feminist Studies.

Angela Davis is the author of ten books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s "Ten Most Wanted List." She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her recent books include Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete? about the abolition of the prison industrial complex, a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and a collection of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom. Her most recent book of essays, called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, was published in February 2016.

Angela Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Like many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a "prison industrial complex," she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.