Xavier Cavazos is a performance artist and a grand slam champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in NYC, and a member of three national poetry slam teams. He is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Barbarian at the Gate (Poetry Society of America), Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube Press), and The Devil’s Workshop (editor’s choice selection from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center). Currently, Cavazos is a senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest, directs the Liberal Studies Program at Central Washington University, and serves on the board of trustees for Humanities Washington.

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa (2022). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music venue 2220arts and writes for LA Times’s Image Magazine, 4Columns, and The New Yorker among other publications. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and a memoir, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects. Her first solo exhibition for The Kitchen follows her participation in LA’s Made in LA biennial in 2020/21, for which she wrote a play turned film entitled God’s Suicide that chronicled James Baldwin’s several suicide attempts throughout his life. Black Backstage will pick up on years of writing, research, and personal engagement around black performance culture and take some of her writing about the unseen aspects of this cultural inheritance off the page.