Very brief biographies of signers, supporters, editors, and members of our Policy Council:
       

Kali Akuno
     
     
loren anderson is a former member of the International Socialist Organization in Washington, D.C., a coordinator for the Campaign for a United Socialist Party and a member of Philadelphia Socialists. He is active in anti-sectarianism, abortion clinic defense/escorting, and going to way too many political conferences like Labor Notes, Historical Materialism Toronto, Left Forum, Socialism 2011-2014, Marxist Humanism (west coast) and others. Find him on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/singularityneuromancer or email him at singularityneuromancer (at) gmail (dot) com.

     
Steve Bloom is a poet and life-long social activist from New York City. Present political affiliations include Solidarity, The Southern Anti-Racism Network, and the Radical Poets Collective. You are invited to visit his poetry website: www.stevebloompoetry.net.
     

Joaquin Bustelo is the pen name of José G. Pérez, a Latino activist based in Atlanta who is a member of the U.S. Socialist organization Solidarity. Pérez is currently a well-known figure among immigrant-rights activists in Georgia, as the producer and co-host of the daily "Hablemos con Teodoro" show on Radio Información 1310 AM, a non-profit Spanish-language progressive talk radio station in Atlanta (and on the Internet) focused on immigrant rights. Pérez also works on the "Música Sin Fronteras" (Music Without Borders) weekly program at Radio Información, the station's only music show. Pérez has a YouTube channel documenting the immigrants rights movement in Atlanta as well as a now-archival one called OccupyAtlantaVoices. He participated very actively in the Occupy Movement in 2011, saying the identification of tens of millions of people with its slogan, "we are the 99%," was the first manifestation of class consciousness—however rudimentary—on a mass scale in the United States in decades. In September 2014, he started blogging at Hatuey's ashes.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer who has worked with several organizations focusing on human rights, social justice, environmental and trade issues. His forthcoming book It's Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment, reflects his interest in synthesizing theory and practice,  analyzing attempts to supplant capitalism in the past in order to draw lessons with application to the emerging and future movements that seek to overcome the crises of today. He also writes about the economic crisis and the political and environmental issues connected to it on the Systemic Disorder blog.

   
Daniel Doyle is the Director of the Mississippi Sustainable Agriculture Network (MSAN), whose mission is to make sustainable farming and local food production thriving enterprises in Mississippi. Doyle also serves on multiple Boards, including the North Mississippi Land Trust, the Mississippi Food Policy Council, and the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. After years of teaching he left the classroom to co-found and manage one of Mississippi's first CSA farms, Yokna (patawpha) Bottoms, in Oxford, MS. He later co-founded Mississippi Ecological Design, a permaculture design business, which developed school gardens and natural play-scapes in LafayetteCounty as well as several soil and water management projects in North Mississippi. During this time, he designed and directed the Mississippi Mobile Farm on Wheels project. Prior to his current position, he served as the Executive Director for the Gaining Ground Sustainability Institute of MS and Editor of their annual journal of sustainable living The Southern Good Life.            
     
     
Theresa El-Amin began her activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1965. She was a union organizer for many years in the Midwest and Northeast. Theresa is founder and regional director of the Southern Anti-Racism Network since 1999 (www.projectsarn.org). Other current affiliations include the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the NAACP. You can reach Theresa via email at solidteacake@gmail.com.
        

Deborah Engel-Di Mauro works at a public library and an independent bookstore in New Paltz, NY. She is involved with Ecosocialist Horizons, also with efforts to free political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz.

     
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro is Associate Professor in the Geography Department of the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is author of Ecology, Soils, and the Left: An Eco-Social Approach (www.palgrave.com/PRODUCTS/title.aspx?pid=685334). His recent teaching subjects include physical geography, gender and environment, people-environment relations, and soils. The principal subjects for current research work are soil degradation, urban soils, heavy metals contamination, and society-environment relations, but he has also published on critical geographies, the European Union, gender and ethnopedology, Indigenous Peoples’ struggles, and pedagogy. He is chief editor for the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism and co-founder, with Joel Kovel, of Ecosocialist Horizons (http://ecosocialisthorizons.com).

     
Mike Frank is a long-time labor activist, member of the Professional Staff Congress (faculty and staff union at the City University of New York) and of Solidarity. 
     
     
Kate Hibbard is a New York City independent-school special education teacher who is active in the Campaign to Free Russell Maroon Shoatz. 

     
Matt Hoke is a socialist activist, organizer, and blogger who participated in Occupy Philly as well as the antiwar movement, same-sex marriage movement, and local efforts to protect the environment in southern New Jersey. He is one of the cofounders of the Campaign for a United Socialist Party, researches the synthesis between revolutionary and electoral strategy, and advocates direct democracy.
     

David Keil is a member of the Socialist Party and of MetroWest Peace Action in Massachusetts, a group he represents on the Coordinating Committee of the United National Antiwar Coalition. David teaches computer science at the university level.   
     

Dequi Kioni-Sadiki is an activist organizer with the Jericho Movement for Amnesty & Recognition of u.s. held PP/POWs, co-coordinator of the Sekou Odinga Defense Committee (so named for her POW husband), co-chair of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, co-producer/co-host of the weekly public affairs program "Where We Live" on listener-sponsored wbai 99.5.fm radio in New York City.

     

Tekla Lewin is a member of the Green Party in Ohio and of Solidarity who is involved in prisoner advocacy. Now retired, she taught mathematics at the university level.

       
Ana Lopez is spokesperson of the New York Coordinators to Free Oscar Lopez Rivera, a grass root collective composed of activists from community-based organizations, students, educators, workers, youth groups, union reps, artists, health workers, cultural workers, some elected officials, etc.


Anne Menasche is a life-long Revolutionary Socialist and Radical Feminist who has a decades-long history of grassroots activism for peace, social justice, and union rights, and for female and lesbian/gay liberation. She founded a lesbian-feminist organization in San Francisco in the mid-1980’s called Lesbian Uprising which lasted through the early 1990’s.  More recently, she was a leader of the Marriage Equality Movement in San Diego. Since 2002, she has worked for Disability Rights California as a civil rights attorney, and recently filed a class action suit against the City of San Diego to stop the ticketing and harassment of homeless people living in RVs and other vehicles.  She is also a long time Green Party member, and ran for Secretary of State in 2010 receiving 3% of the vote. 


Matt Meyer is a well-known New York City activist, the author of numerous books, War Resisters International Africa Support Network Coordinator, and a representative of the International Peace Research Association.
   

Lee Miscere is an activist in the New York Campaign to Free Russell Maroon Shoatz.

     
Efia Nwangaza is a lifelong civil/human rights activist and freedom fighter who first worked for the liberation of African/Black people as a child in her Garveyite parents' apostolic faith church, in Norfolk, Virginia. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Afrikan-American Institute for Policy Studies and Planning and founding member and South Carolina Coordinator for the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement for Self-Determination.  She is the founder/coordinator of the WMXP-LP community-based radio, and a national board member of the Pacifica Foundation, the nations oldest progressive radio network. Efia is the former co-chair of the Jericho Movement for US Political Prisoners and is presently director of The Malcolm X Center in Greenville, South Carolina. Other organizational affiliations include the Stop Mass Incarceration Network; the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation; the Green Party; Not In Our Name; U.S. Human Rights Network; N’COBRA; Black Is Back Coalition. She is an Amnesty International USA Human Rights Defender, and past member of the national Board of Directors for the National Organization for Women.
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Bryan Olamo is a New York City musician who is active in the Campaign to Free Russell Maroon Shoatz.

       

Thano Paris became politically active as a high school student around the struggle to prevent the threatened execution of  political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1995. He has been active in student and campus campaigns around worker justice, anti-war, and Palestine solidarity work. He is co-convenor of the Progressive Student Alliance at Georgia State University, a member of the socialist organization Solidarity, and a supporter of the Black Left Unity Network.
     
           
Carlos Rovira, aka "Carlito," is currently involved in the campaigns to free political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Oscar Lopez Rivera, as well as other struggles against capitalist oppression, in support of antiracism and for Puerto Rican independence. During the 1960s and ‘70s he was a member of the Young Lords, a militant Puerto Rican youth organization. His parents were members of the clandestine New York committee of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico during the 1950s.

     
Peter Solenberger is a life-long activist and revolutionary, resident in Michigan. Current affiliations include Solidarity, the Fourth International, Socialist Party, Green Party, Democratic Socialists of America, UAW 1981 (National Writers Union), and others.
     
     
Kempis "Ghani" Songster was released on parole from Graterford state prison in Pennsylvania in December 2017 after a series of court decisions regarding juveniles serving “death by incarceration” (life without parole) sentences. For more on his 30-year imprisonment and legal case go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/podcasts/dispatch/. While still in prison Ghani became active with a “restorative justice” project called “Ubuntu Philadelphia,” which held a conference last year at which he spoke by phone from prison. (“Ubuntu” is an African word meaning “I am because you are.”)
     
     
Meg Starr is an educator and author of children's books, including the award-winning Alicia's Happy Day. A life-long feminist and anti-imperialist she has worked in solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico since the early 1980s and is a founder of Resistance in Brooklyn (RnB). Meg has helped initiate such mainstays of the New York City left as the annual "Roses and Bread" women's/trans open-poetry event, and the annual RnB "Anti-July 4th Barbecue," which together have raised many thousands of dollars for local grassroots radical causes.
   
     
Sean Sweeney is a well-known activist in the international campaign to stop climate change, with a focus on involvement by the labor movement.
     
     
Linda Thompson is an artist and photographer, former adjunct Professor of Sociology & Women’s Studies at Southern Connecticut  State University. She is  a founder of the Connecticut Ecological Health Organization ECHO, member of the Norwich Connecticut Chapter of the NAACP and of Solidarity, a former union rep and now AFSCME retiree. She is also currently Co-Chair of the Green Party of Connecticut and serves on the National Committee of the Green Party USA. In the 1960’s she went to jail in Cambridge, Maryland during the civil right struggle there and was later Coordinator of the Boston Coalition Against the War in Vietnam.
     
     
Takuma Umoja

Ron Warren          
     
Gene Warren, Jr. focused his youthful rebellion in the civil rights/Black liberation and anti-Viet Nam war movements. After 1969 he belonged to several revolutionary organizations, was a founding member of Solidarity and still belongs to that group. He has identified as an ecosocialist since the late 1990s. In 2005 he helped to organize "Converging Storms, the Crisis of Energy, Capitalism and the Environment," a seven week study series in Los Angeles, California.  
     
      
Eileen Weitzman is an attorney and artist, resident in Brooklyn, NY, who has  worked on housing, Palestinian solidarity, immigration, and prison issues for many years. She is currently co-chair of the Palestinian solidarity committee of the National Lawyers Guild and active in the New Sanctuary Coalition.