Picture Book Author-Illustrator Mentor: Juana Martinez-Neal 

Juana Martinez-Neal is the recipient of the 2019 Caldecott Honor for Alma and How She Got Her Name (Candlewick Press), her debut picture book as author-illustrator. She is also a New York Times bestselling illustrator recipient of the 2020 Robert F. Sibert Medal for Fry Bread: A Native American Story (Roaring Brook) and the 2018 Pura Belpré Medal for Illustration for La Princesa and the Pea (Putnam). Juana was named to the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Honor list in 2014, and was awarded the SCBWI Portfolio Showcase Grand Prize in 2012. She was born in Lima, the capital of Peru, and now lives in Connecticut, with her husband and three children.

Middle Grade Mentor: Yamile Saied Méndez

Yamile Saied Méndez is the author of many books for young readers of all ages, including Furia, a Reese's YA Book Club selection and the 2021 Inaugural Pura Belpré Young Adult Gold Medalist. She was born and raised in Rosario, Argentina, but has lived most of her life in a lovely valley surrounded by mountains with her family. An Inaugural Walter Dean Myers Grant recipient, she is also a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’s a founding member of Las Musas, a marketing collective of Latine authors. Connect with her at yamilesmendez.com.

YA Mentor: Lilliam Rivera

Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning author of young adult novels We Light Up The Sky; Never Look Back, a Pura Belpré Honor book; Dealing in Dreams, and The Education of Margot Sanchez, as well as the Goldie Vance series for middle-grade readers and the graphic novel, Unearthed: A Jessica Cruz Story. Her latest middle grade novel Barely Floating will be available from Kokila Books in May 2023. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.

SFF Mentor: Daniel José Older

Daniel José Older, a lead story architect for Star Wars: The High Republic, is the New York Times best-selling author of the upcoming young adult fantasy novel Ballad & Dagger (Book 1 of the Outlaw Saints series), and numerous other books, including Shadowshaper, which was named one of the best fantasy books of all time by TIME magazine and one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read. He won the International Latino Book Award and has been nominated for the Kirkus Prize, The World Fantasy Award, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, and the Mythopoeic Award. He co-wrote the upcoming graphic novel Death’s Day. You can find more info and read about his decade-long career as an NYC paramedic at http://danieljoseolder.net/

Graphic Novel Mentor: Terry Blas

Terry Blas is the illustrator and writer behind the viral webcomics “You Say Latino” and “You Say Latinx” (Vox.com). He has written comics for Ariana Grande and the series Steven Universe and Rick and Morty. His original graphic novels are Dead Weight: Murder at Camp Bloom (Oni Press), Hotel Dare (Kaboom!), and Lifetime Passes (Abrams/Surely Books 2021). He is the writer for the Mexican Marvel Comics superhero series Reptil. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his husband and their dog, Alfie. He enjoys drawing people, animals, superheroes and drag queens.

Poetry Mentor: Ariana Brown

Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from San Antonio, TX, currently based in Houston. She is the author of We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). Ariana’s work investigates queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, Black relationality and girlhood, loneliness, and care. She holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies, an M.F.A. in Poetry, and is pursuing an M.L.S. in Library Science. Ariana is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion and owes much of her practice to Black performance communities led by Black women poets from the South. She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for over ten years. Follow Ariana online @ArianaThePoet.

Nonfiction Mentor: John Paul Brammer

John Paul Brammer is an author and illustrator from rural Oklahoma. His first book, ¡Hola Papi!, is based on his popular advice column of the same name and was released in June 2021 to critical acclaim, twice being named an Editors' Choice in the New York Times Book Review and being selected as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. In 2022, Brammer was named the recipient of the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award. He is currently a contributing columnist to the Washington Post, where his illustrations and words regularly appear. He is working on his second book and with production company Funny Or Die to develop ¡Hola Papi! for television.

Fiction Mentor: Melissa Rivero

Melissa Rivero is the author of The Affairs of the Falcóns, which won the 2019 New American Voices Award and a 2020 International Latino Book Award. The novel was also longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Born in Lima, Peru and raised in Brooklyn, she is a graduate of NYU and Brooklyn Law School. She still lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Spanish Language Mentor: Naida Saavedra

Naida Saavedra is a writer, scholar, and professor. She is the author of Vos no viste que no lloré por vos (El perro y la rana, 2009), Última inocencia (SEd Ebook, 2013), Hábitat (2013), Vestier y otras miserias (Verbum, 2015), and Desordenadas (Sed, 2019). Currently, Saavedra is the editor of La Pilsen Review, the literary review section of El BeiSmAn. Her research focuses on issues of identity, migration, and social media in contemporary Latinx Literature. In 2019, with Amrita Das, Saavedra coedited Ecos urbanos: Literatura contemporánea en español en Estados Unidos, Hostos Review Issue 15. She is documenting the current literary movement in Spanish in USA for which she published the essay book #NewLatinoBoom: cartografía de la narrativa en español de EE UU (El BeiSmAn PrESs, 2020). Saavedra lives in Massachusetts, where she is a professor of Latinx and Latin American Literature at Worcester State University.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez (they/she) is a poet, mixed media artist, and youth arts educator from Bronx, NY, with roots in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. As an artist in an abolitionist mindset, their work explores the question: Who are we at our most free? Ayling turns to poetry because of the potential they see in curious manipulations of language to bring forth building blocks for radically different, care-centered futures. Ayling has been a Featured Performer and Poetry Workshop Facilitator with United We Dream, the Writers Guild Initiative, and Make the Road NY. They have been granted a seat in several Cave Canem workshops, the LAByrinth Intensive, and the Maria Irene Fornés Playwriting Workshop. They were a 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow, 2020 DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium Fellow, in community at The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat, and awarded the Laundromat Project Seed Grant to host poetry workshops for BIPOC caretakers in laundromats throughout the Bronx and Brooklyn. Ayling was a 2023 Prufer Poetry Prize Finalist, and received Honorable Mention for the 2022 Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize. Select poems of theirs have been published in Moko Magazine, The Protest Review, The Mujerista, Latino Rebels, and Alegria Magazine’s Latinx Poetry Anthology. Ayling is also an avid bubble-tea and latte fanatic, bachata dancer, and reality TV show couch-commentator. 

Vanessa Micale is a multidisciplinary artist who lives in Portland, Oregon. She is a mixed Uruguayan-American who creates across monikers and mediums as a poet, writer, singer-songwriter, musician and performer.
Vanessa is a fellow of Anaphora Arts (2021) and VONA (2018). She is a 2022 Randolph College MFA Blackburn Fellow. She holds a BA in Creative Writing with honors from San Francisco State University.
In 2021, Vanessa became a certified Resilience Toolkit Facilitator through Lumos Transforms. She is a social justice advocate and bilingual facilitator. She is a 2018 ValorUS LEAP Fellow through ValorUS, for women of color in the movement to end gender-based violence.

Over the years, she self-recorded 8 albums and produced a handful of zines, none of which are available online.
https://www.vanessamicale.com/

Ridley Adams is an Afro-Brazilian conservation biologist and YA/adult fantasy and science fiction author. They are passionate about Latine representation in publishing, and love world-building, morally grey and complex characters, swashbuckling action, and fantastical creatures. Having spent three years honing their craft, they’re thrilled to have been selected to be part of this mentorship program and can’t wait to get started! When not camping with lions while doing their PhD on human-wildlife conflict in Botswana, you can find Ridley playing sabaac at Disney's Galaxy's Edge, working on their latest cosplay build, fencing, practicing their archery, or going on adventures with their mischievous Ragdoll kitten, Kea.     

Ofelia Vazquez is a Mexican-American writer, Cal alumna, and Georgia Tech graduate student living in the San Francisco Bay area. During the day, she can be found building regression models in front of an outrageously large monitor, and at night she can be found playing tabletop role-playing games in front of a comically small monitor. Her first short story, Pulp, will be published in 2023. You can find Ofelia's social media and newsletter through linktr.ee/ofeliawrites.

Nohora Arrieta Fernández grew up in Cartagena, Colombia. She got her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University and recently moved to Los Ángeles. Her essays and articles on contemporary arts have appeared in Terremoto, Contemporary&, Artishock, and other venues. Sometimes, Nohora translates poetry. 

Pamela Nunez (She/They) is a freelance illustrator and sequential artist based in Chicago. Born in Ciudad De México, after arriving in the U.S. Pamela pursued an education in science and engineering at Depaul University; however since her heart lay in the arts she decided to pursue a career in comics and illustration. In her spare time she enjoys crying over fictional characters from video games and animated series, as well as daydreaming about her own characters.

Sofía Aguilar is a Chicana writer and editor based on the traditional homelands of the Tongva and Chumash peoples, now known as Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Times, Refinery29 Somos, and New Orleans Review, among other publications. As an alum of WriteGirl and a first-generation college graduate, Sofía earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she received the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry and the Spencer Barnett Memorial Prize for Excellence in Latin American and Latinx Studies. Additionally, she is the 2022 recipient of the Sandra Cisneros Fellowship from Under the Volcano, a two-time recipient of the Nancy Lynn Schwartz Prize for Fiction, and a two-time Best of the Net nominee. STREAMING SERVICE: golden shovels made for tv (2021) is her self-published debut poetry chapbook. Its sequel STREAMING SERVICE: season two, also self-published, was released in June 2022. You can find her at sofiaaguilar.com.