Jennifer Dentel is an independent researcher and curator from Chicago. Jennifer currently works at Gerber/Hart, an LGBTQ library and archive specializing in the LGBTQ history and culture of Chicago and the Midwest. In addition to her research on pulp author and activist Valerie Taylor, she has co-curated several exhibits at Gerber/Hart, including on pre-Stonewall activism, the history of drag in Chicago, and lesbians and feminism in Chicago in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Jeremy Dixon is a poet and founder of groundbreaking queer publishing house Hazard Press, based in Wales. Jeremy is also a designer and lecturer on book arts. He has participated in book fairs including Turn the Page in Norwich and the Small Publishers’ Fair in London. His debut poetry collection IN RETAIL was published by Arachne Press in February 2019.
Since completing his doctorate on Djuna Barnes, Richard Espley has published on Barnes and other modernists, the literary portrayal of London Zoo, commemorative representations of the First World War and issues of censorship in the modernism period. He has worked professionally in libraries for some years and is currently Head of Collections at Senate House Library, University of London.
David Grundy is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, and the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019). A poet and publisher, he co-runs the small press Materials and the magazine Splinter. He is currently working on a book entitled Never By Itself Alone, concerning queer poetics in Boston and San Francisco, and co-editing the forthcoming Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press).
Leila Kassir has worked in libraries for twenty years and is currently Academic Librarian for British, US, Latin American and Caribbean literature at Senate House Library. She is nearing the end of an MA by Research in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, researching the literary and archival representation of J. Lyons & Co. She has published on zines and fanzines and how libraries collect and use them.
Graham McKerrow is a journalist and political activist who edited leading gay and HIV/AIDS publications. He was involved in gay rights activism in Oxford in the 1970s, where he was also a representative on the Oxford Anti-Fascist Committee which organised opposition to the far-right National Front. He trained as a journalist on local newspapers and in 1980 he joined Gay News as a reporter and investigated police harassment and failings. The following year he co-founded and then co-edited Capital Gay, a campaigning weekly newspaper, which led coverage of HIV/AIDS as well as exposing police agents provocateurs and other harassment by the authorities, media, politicians and religious leaders. He was co-ordinator of the Defend Gay’s the Word Campaign in the 1980s and in the 1990s edited the magazine Positive Nation for people with HIV/AIDS. He then spent 15 years at the Guardian, ultimately as editor of the Guardian and Observer Syndication Service.
Alexandra Parsons is a postdoctoral fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and teaches literature and queer studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Her book, Luminous Presence: Derek Jarman’s Life-Writing, is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.
Will Visconti completed a joint PhD in French Studies and Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. His teaching spans additional disciplines from history to modern languages at universities in Britain and Australia. From 2017 to 2018 he was a Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Modern Languages Research at Senate House, London. Since 2012 he has been involved with the Australasian Humour Studies Network and Centre for Media & Celebrity Studies. Visconti’s research focuses on representations of gender, sexuality and transgression, particularly during the late nineteenth century. He is currently working on a biography of the performer Louise Weber, La Goulue.