Abigail Judge
Abigail M. Judge, Ph.D. is a clinical and forensic psychologist whose work is dedicated to women at the intersection of commercial sexual exploitation and substance use. Dr. Judge has worked with this population as a clinician, educator, consultant, program developer and expert witness since 2009. Themes in Dr. Judge’s scholarship and practice are building collaboration between sectors that have been historically mistrusting and siloed and integrating clinical and peer expertise in services design and delivery.
Dr. Judge co-founded and leads Boston Human Exploitation and Trafficking (HEAT), a collaboration between Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Police Department’s Human Trafficking Unit (HTU). Boston HEAT provides low barrier, clinical and peer support to women whose active substance use and exploitation in the sex trade limit their access to mainstream services. Our clinical and peer led team engages women where they physically present in order to support their unique goals: through tailored street and jail outreach, HTU ride-alongs, and a nighttime drop-in center in the Boston neighborhood known as “Mass and Cass”. Dr. Judge is on the part-time clinical faculty at Harvard Medical School, and she teaches at the regional and national level. Dr. Judge’s scholarship and clinical work have been supported by grants from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General, and the Imago Dei Fund. She also writes fiction, and her work has been honored with scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Cynthia Preston
Cynthia Preston is an Actor and Producer, known for her roles in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Carrie, Showtime’s Total Recall 2070, and Whale Music, which was the opening film of the Toronto Film Festival and nominated for Best Picture in Canada. She has appeared in 41 films, played the lead in 19, and has been in more than 240 episodes of television. Among her many credits, Cynthia is the voice of Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda animated series.
Cynthia produced and starred in the award-winning short film Mute, based on a story by Stephen King. She is writing a television series and she and her writing partners at Dame 51 Productions are developing a feature film.
In 2022, Cynthia co-founded Cyndicate VR Productions. S.T.A.R.S. VR is their flagship project.
Jose Hidalgo
Jose Hidalgo, MD is a member of the Division of Public and Community Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Director of Psychiatry at the Suffolk County House of Correction. He has an interest in improving the care for vulnerable and marginalized populations and has developed trauma-informed programs to improve the lives of victims of human trafficking, unaccompanied migrant children, and incarcerated people. Dr. Hidalgo enjoys teaching and training mental health professionals. He developed a course on providing mental health care in correctional settings for psychiatrists in training. Dr. Hidalgo is board certified in general and forensic psychiatry.
Victoria Lee Hood
Victoria is a brand marketing and communications strategist. For nearly two decades, she worked in the global financial technology sector, based in New York and London. A native Bostonian of Taisanese-American descent, Victoria has served as an active advisor to organizations focused on women’s economic empowerment, immigrant rights, combating sexual assault against people with disabilities, LGBTQ+equality, and interfaith youth leadership. She earned a BA in Spanish Language and Literature, Phi Beta Kappa, from Wellesley College.
Randall Horton
Thomas McNeely
Thomas H. McNeely teaches literature and composition in the Honors Program at Emerson College and fiction writing in the Stanford Online Writing Studio. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. His short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Epoch, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other magazines and anthologies. Ghost Horse, his first novel, was published in 2014.
Tricia Rose
Born and raised in Harlem and the Bronx, Rose graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology (1984) and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in American Studies (1993). She has taught at NYU, and UC Santa Cruz and has, since 2006 been a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown. Rose is an internationally respected scholar of post civil rights era black U.S. culture, popular music, social issues, gender and sexuality. She has been awarded for her teaching and has received several scholarly fellowships including ones from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Association of University Women.
She is most well known for her groundbreaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America is considered a foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what is now an entire field of study. Black Noise won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995, was voted among the top 25 books of 1995 by the Village Voice and in 1999 was listed by Black Issues in Higher Education as one of its “Top Books of the Twentieth Century.” In 2003 Rose published a rare oral narrative history of black women’s sexual life stories, called Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. In 2008, Professor Rose returned to hip hop to challenge the field she helped found, with: The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters.
Rose is currently working on a multimedia project called How Structural Racism Works. This project examines how deep racial inequality is reproduced today and the stories that obscure it.
Vincent Xeus
Vincent Xeus is a visual artist. His artworks have been featured in museum exhibitions and international art fairs such as Autry National Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach, LA Art Show, and Art Market San Francisco. He is the recipient of international awards from institutions including Portrait Society of America and Art Renewal Center. He served as the Board Director of Arts Council of Napa Valley and as Yountville Arts Commissioner. Xeus was named one of the top 100 living artists of the contemporary era by Buzzfeed and Poets And Artists. Vincent Xeus holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Columbia University.
John Skoyles
John Skoyles is the Poetry Editor of Ploughshares. He has published six books of poems, and four of prose. His awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the New York and North Carolina Arts Councils. He has previously taught at Southern Methodist University, Sarah Lawrence College, Emerson College and Warren Wilson College, where he directed the MFA program. He currently serves as a member of the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Jabari Asim
Jabari Asim is the Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Emerson College and former Executive Editor of The Crisis magazine, the flagship journal of the NAACP. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Only The Strong. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts.