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: Julian Randall

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He is the author of three middle grade novels including Pilar Ramirez duology and The Chainbreakers. His other writing has been anthologized in Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed: 15 Voices from the Latinx Diaspora and Black Boy Joy a #1 New York Times Best Seller! He can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @JulianThePoet and on his website JulianDavidRandall.com.

Young Adult Mentor: Zoraida Córdova

Zoraida Córdova is the acclaimed author and editor of more than two dozen novels and short fiction, including The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, Star Wars: The High Republic: Convergence, and the Brooklyn Brujas series. She’s written for Disney Books, Marvel Comics, and Lucasfilm Press. When she’s not writing, she serves on the board of We Need Diverse Books, cohosts the writing podcast, Deadline City, and develops intellectual property for Cake Creative & Electric Postcard Entertainment as a Tastemaker. Zoraida was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and calls New York City home. When she’s not working, she’s roaming the world in search of magical stories.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Mentor: Isabel Cañas

Isabel Cañas is a Mexican American speculative fiction writer. After having lived in Mexico, Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, and New York City, among other places, she has settled in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and writes fiction inspired by her research and her heritage.

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: Jacquira Díaz

Born in Puerto Rico, Jaquira Díaz was raised between Humacao, Fajardo, and Miami Beach. She is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indie Next Pick, a Library Reads pick, and finalist for the B&N Discover Prize. Ordinary Girls was optioned for television and is currently in development at FX with Díaz as Co-Executive Producer.

The recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Alonzo Davis Fellowship from VCCA, two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from MacDowell, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, Díaz has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, Time Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Fader, and her stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext,Best American Experimental Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University’s MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her second book, I Am Deliberate, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books. She lives in New York with her spouse, the writer Lars Horn, and she’s an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.

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.

Tabitha Sin is a speculative fiction writer who dabbles occasionally in hybrid-memoir. Her short story, “Homebound,” was most recently published in Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. She is an alum of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and a Periplus Fellowship Finalist. When she is not crafting strange worlds, she spoils her dog the best she can.

Manager, Educator, and former High School Social Studies teacher, Veronica Jorge credits her love of history to the potpourri of cultures that make up her own life and to her upbringing in diverse Brooklyn, New York. Her work is often based on a search into her ethnic roots that explore identity, belonging, and self-discovery. Her genres of choice are historical fiction, where she always makes new discoveries, literary works because she loves beautiful writing, and children’s picture books because there are so many wonderful worlds yet to be imagined and visited. She currently resides in Macungie, PA.

Justin Bonilla is a gay, Nuyorican TV drama writer. Raised by a loving, single mom and his side-splitting, head-smacking abuelita in Queens, New York, Justin loves nothing more than mining his Latino, working class roots for fresh, untold stories. Since graduating NYU film school, his projects have been featured at Outfest, the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and NYU's Tisch Represents alumni diversity showcase. A traitor to the city that shaped him, Justin now lives in Los Angeles where he’s worked on the bilingual show Acapulco (AppleTV+) and most recently completed his third season writing on Physical (AppleTV+).

Adriana Lebrón White is an autistic librarian, speaker, and writer. She’s a passionate supporter of books by autistic and disabled authors, and she advises educators on the importance of these books through workshops and presentations. In her own work, Adriana is committed to writing authentic stories about autistic characters while also paying homage to her Puerto Rican and Mexican heritage. She's a former #PBChat mentee, and a recipient of the Walter Grant from We Need Diverse Books. She has Master’s degrees in Special Education and Library Science, and a certificate in Storytelling. To learn more, visit her website, adrianalwhite.com.

Yomari Lobo is a graduate student and aspiring author. She has always had a passion for writing, and writing a novel was always on her bucket list. After the pandemic, she fell back in love with writing and began writing stories with magical worlds and enchanting characters. She is currently working on her first novel. When not absorbed in the latest gripping page-turner, Yomari loves cooking, hopping into a new universe, riding a heart-stopping roller coaster, and otherwise spending far too much time shopping online. She lives in Portland, with her dog, Stark.

Iris Quiroga is an author and illustrator from California, plus a bi-cultural, active, and fun-loving person who entertains herself with comedy, soccer, language learning, and travel. Similar to the land where half of her heritage comes from, Colombia, her work is made of colores y cariño, or colors and affection. In her writing, she draws a lot of inspiration from her family and her culture. In her artwork she finds it most interesting when there are diverse textures, colors, and materials all combining to tell stories with nuance and humor. She most enjoys using mixed media and collage with digital touch-ups.

Crystal Vance Guerra is a chicana poet, historian, and educator based in and between Chicago and Mexico City.

Her art is latinamericanist at root, often spanglish in expression, and written to be read out loud.

Crystal is also the founder of Chicago’s only poetry slam in Spanish, Slam Diáspora, which brings together Latinx poets in the U.S. and poets across Latin America to foster unity between our poetic communities despite the borders.