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Cleavon Smith is the playwright in residence at TheatreFIRST. His credits include Vs. and The Last Sermon of Sister Imani as well as the one-act, “Just One Day” featured in the Theatre Bay Area award-winning anthology production Between Us. He’s won a PlayGround Emerging Playwright Award and had work featured in UC Berkeley’s New Play Reading Series, the Ohlone College Playwrights Festival, and two Utopia Theatre Project productions. Cleavon was a finalist for the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s 2018 Playwrights Festival and is the artist mentor for Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Young Writers of Color Collective. Upcoming projects of his include an audio drama collaboration with playwrights Lauren Gunderson and Jonathan Spector produced by the Aurora Theatre as well as an audio drama series for TheatreFIRST.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a native of Panama and currently based in New York City, Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize from Northwestern University Press and he Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas and University of Notre Dame Press, both of his prize-winning collections are forthcoming in 2021. His poems have previously appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere in print and online. Holnes is a Cave Canem and a CantoMundo fellow. His poetry has also earned him scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International, and residencies nationwide including a MacDowell Arts Colony residency. He is an Assistant Professor at Medgar Evers College and he teaches at New York University. @blackboytraveljoy -- www.darrelholnes.com

Karl O’Brian Williams is a Jamaican-born actor, playwright, director, producer, and educator. His acting career has taken him from stages in the Caribbean to those in New York, Toronto, and the United Kingdom. He is the audiobook narrator for Maisy Card’s “These Ghosts Are Family” one of Paste Magazine’s Top 10 Audio Books for March 2020, and Libro FMs Book of the Month for May 2020. In 2019 he was co-writer on the short film “Winston,” adapted from his monologue "The Kept Man", "Winston" was featured at the Hip Hop Film Festival, Bronzelens, Circle City Film Festival, Queen City Film Festival and the Pan African Film Festival. His play, ‘The Black That I Am’ has been staged in Glasgow and Galloway for the National Theatre of Scotland, and at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. ‘Not About Eve’ had a successful run Off-Off Broadway in New York, Queens, Brooklyn, Rochester, Hartford, Connecticut, and in North Carolina at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem. In 2013 the play received 3 AUDELCO nominations for Excellence in Black Theatre including Outstanding Ensemble Cast, Best Dramatic Production, and Best Playwright. He is currently Deputy Chair and Theatre Coordinator in the Speech, Communication and Theatre Arts Department at The Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). As Artistic Director for Braata Productions, Karl curates the organization’s bi-annual Caribbean Play Reading Series, creates educational theatre curriculum for after school and senior center programs, and was the brainchild of Braata’s annual events, Bankra Caribbean Folk Festival, and Old Time Grand Market. He continues to pursue artistic projects that interrogate socio-political issues, especially those intersecting with Caribbean culture, race, queerness, and immigration.