Davis Madole is a content creator, aspiring writer, and filmmaker. Davis is the owner of the YouTube channel "TitanGoji" where he writes and uploads video essays on tokusatsu and anime with a deep love for Japanese pop culture....
Dearly Yun is a small-time cosplayer in Seoul, Korea. He has been cosplaying for around 3 years, starting in late 2019. He has experience in both masculine and feminine styles as he likes to experiment with different styles of hair and makeup. He is currently most known for cosplaying characters from anime and video games, particularly Genshin Impact. You can follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dearly.yun...
Natalya Rodriguez specializes in the material culture of contemporary Japan and its diasporas in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the ways that people use heritage textiles and traditional forms of dress as tools for identity formation, political advocacy, social power, and economic revitalization....
Kaitlyn Ugoretz is an anthropologist of religion and PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on how Japanese religion and culture travels around the world, and she is currently writing her dissertation on online Shinto communities. She writes for public venues, including the Washington Post, Religion News Service, and The Conversation, and she has consulted on trading card games and animation projects. Kaitlyn is the host of the award-winning educational YouTube channel Eat Pray Anime, which explores the religious history and culture behind our favorite Japanese media....
Andrea Horbinski holds a PhD in modern Japanese history with a designated emphasis in new media from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Manga’s Global Century: A History of Japanese Comics, 1905-1989, is under contract to the University of California Press. She has discussed anime, manga, fandom, and Japanese history at conventions and conferences on five continents, and her articles have appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures, Convergence, Internet Histories, and Mechademia. She currently serves as the submissions editor for Mechademia: Second Arc and on the board of The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies....
Meg is a fan fiction writer from the east coast. She discovered fan fiction over 20 years ago after looking up spoilers about an episode of Smackdown and has been writing ever since. She has dabbled in many fandoms, but right now is focused on writing fan fiction for My Hero Academia. When she is writing, Meg enjoys baking, crafts, chasing around her toddler, annoying my husband, and pole dancing....
Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, No Gods for Drowning, The Worm and His Kings, and other books of dark fiction. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, with dozens of short stories appearing in Pseudopod, Vastarien, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Daily Science Fiction, and other publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their mad science experiments are secret. Find Hailey at www.haileypiper.com or on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays....
Lori Morimoto researches transnational/transcultural fandoms and transnational media co-production and distribution. Her work has been published in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Transformative Works and Cultures, Participations, Asian Cinema, and Mechademia: Second Arc. She has also contributed to Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge, 2018), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), and Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics (Iowa, 2021). She teaches courses in media fandom, East Asian film and media, television, and videographic criticism....
Angela Shanté is an award-winning author, multi-hyphenate creative, and fierce advocate for diversity & inclusion in education and in the arts. Her newest title The Noisy Classroom Goes to the Museum is the second book in a series about her unconventional third-grade classroom. In the classroom, she taught emergent learners through college; specializing in literacy and curriculum development. After leaving the classroom Angela worked in publishing for traditional and educational publishers as an Editor, Children’s Book Acquisition Editor, and Consultant. Angela recently launched Sunday Dinner Publishing, an Indie pub focused on inclusive stories and marginalized voices highlighting BIPOC creatives in publishing. Check out her site: https://www.angelashante.com/...
James Welker is a professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at Kanagawa University in Yokohama, Japan. He researches gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan, with an emphasis on the consumers and producers of queer media, the lesbian community, and radical feminism, as well as the globalization of Japanese popular culture. He is currently researching the global fandom of queer media from Japan—particularly boys love (BL), yuri, and trans manga, anime, and other media—and the relationship between that fandom and local LGBTQ+ cultures. He is the author of Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls’ Comics Artists and Fans (Hawai‘i, forthcoming) and the editor of Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (Hawai‘i, 2022), BL ga hiraku tobira: Hen’yō suru Ajia no sekushuariti...