Announcing The New Members Of The 2023 One Humanity Writing Collective

The One Humanity Writing Collective was born out of a collaboration between Syllble and The Innovation Station at the U.S. Department of State Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues. With an ambitious vision, it pairs for the first time women, queer and non-binary creative writers and visual artists from different locations around the world with U.S state locations to imagine new possibilities to the problems our world faces.

Explore the One Humanity world and its first class here. Today the collective holds members from: Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Pacific Islands, Hawaii, Alaska, Louisiana and California.

Syllble is extremely excited to announce this years talented women and non-binary members chosen to be apart of One Humanity. Together they will address specifically climate change issues facing their own communities through collaborative worldbuilding and storytelling. The global climate challenges they will tackle are as follows – Drought, Sea Level Rise, Wildfires, Acidification, Severe Storms and Heat Waves.

Here are the 2023 members:

C.B. Calsing is a native of the Central Coast of California. She taught school in various positions for nearly twenty years and has been involved in epublishing since 2004. After living in New Orleans and on the Island of Hawaii, she’s returned to California, calling the lovely Kern River Valley home for now. She possesses a master’s in fiction writing from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans and writes in several genres and lengths. Her husband, dog, and cooking bring her joy. Find more information at her blog: cbcalsing.blogspot.com.

Ligia Anjos is a 23 years old Brazilian Woman. She is a Designer with a very broad training background, coming from a graduation that studies media, philosophy and sociology related to communication and investigates new technologies, which allows a horizontal thinking about the problems we face. She has already carried out different works in audiovisual and cultural production, having participated in festivals and exhibitions. Ligia studied image and technology and was part of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Deviant Art, Science and Technologies (ACTlab) at Campinas State University in Brazil.

Rose Himber Howse is a queer writer from North Carolina and a current Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She’s also a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as fiction editor of The Greensboro Review, and was a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow in fiction at San Jose State University. Rose’s fiction and essays appear in Joyland, The Carolina Quarterly, YES! Magazine, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. 

Beatriz Villela Baptista lives in Louveira, Brasil. She studies at Midialogia Unicamp as a a social communications major. She is very interested in writing, books, tv shows, cinema and music. 

Elyse Hauser is a writer from the Pacific Northwest who lives in Louisiana, where she’s finishing her MFA at the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. As an emerging environmental writer, she focuses on marine ecosystems, especially the deep sea and protecting the unknown. 

Dani Sou is a multiartist based in São Paulo, Brasil. She has worked as a music, video and cinema director, as an actress, dancer, vocal artist and writer. During her masters’ degree, she researched how the sounds of nature (thunders, wind, forest sounds) and the female voice can provide rich elements for a soundtrack as well as a powerful sonic atmosphere for stage performers. She is also graduated in Language and Literature and has written short stories, poems, songs and screenplays.

Larissa Mendes is a 25-year-old woman, graduating in social communication from Unicamp (Brazil), with a passion for fiction, mainly audiovisual.  She currently works with event diffusion and content creation in a tech company and is also a content creator for social media.  She produced and directed short films during college, two of which have already circulated in festivals.  

C.A. Munn is a New Orleans-based writer and theater-maker. They received their M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of New Orleans in 2022. Their plays have been produced and read at events and venues such as the Mid-America Theatre Conference, UNO School of the Arts, and Theatre Oxford in Oxford, MS. Munn has been a finalist for the International Literary Awards’ Rita Dove Prize in poetry, a semi-finalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize, and a Pushcart nominee in fiction. Their story “The Mantis” was recently named a runner-up in the 2023 Saints and Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival fiction contest, and will be published in the festival’s fiction anthology. Munn’s work can be found on the Ploughshares Blog and in Screen Door Review, Peauxdunque Review, and Ellipsis Journal.

Lizbeth Luevano (she/her/ella) is a current undergraduate student at Stanford University studying Environmental Anthropology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, with a Notation in Science Communication. Lizbeth uses portraiture and writing to engage with activism and is passionate about using story reclamation, traditional ecological knowledge, and mutual aid to reassert community agency amidst local environmental mismanagement and bring about narrative change. Having been raised in the Coachella Valley, and hailing from a family of migrant field workers, Lizbeth has a vested interest in understanding dispossession and unraveling how we navigate a geopolitical terrain where land and labor exploitation are irrevocably intertwined. She is an aspiring immigration rights lawyer hoping to assist individuals who have been subjected to environmental injustices and she enjoys learning more about borderland literature and imaginative ways of constructing resistance. She has been recognized by the Gates Scholarship, the Horatio Alger Foundation, and the Hispanic Heritage Youth Awards for her academic performance and community involvement. Currently, she is a workshop facilitator with the Outdoorist Oath, helping people imagine an equitable way of recreating and living in the outdoors. At Stanford, she is involved with SproutUp, bringing an environmental education curriculum to first grade students, and also helps develop educational materials for Earthtones, an annual environmental justice festival at Stanford University. In her free time, she enjoys hiking the desert landscape and hanging out with her chihuahua, Scooby.  

Not listed: Zitong (Ann) Xu (Los Angeles), Irene Olkeriil (Paula), Rosiana Lagi (Fiji)

The One Humanity Writing Collective will be engaging in Virtual Salon Discussions over the next six month both internally and with a series of experts sourced with the support of the Innovation Station who have joined the Syllble Brain Trust as mentors this year.

Lauren Bickley is based on the island of Maui. She serves as the Hawaii Regional Manager at the Surfrider Foundation and supports the state’s five chapters spread across four islands. An ocean addict from a young age, Lauren first got involved with the Surfrider Foundation in college while leading the University of Miami Club Chapter. It was through her involvement with Surfrider Foundation that her interest in marine sciences switched from data gathering and lab work to front-line, ocean activism. Her experiences led her to California where she received her Masters Degree in Environmental Science and Management. Lauren has spent over a decade working to protect Hawaii’s marine environment and volunteering with the Maui Chapter. She is passionate about tackling plastic pollution, speaking up for the ocean, and surfing perfect lefts.  

Dr. İlkay Altıntaş, a research scientist at the University of California San Diego, is the Chief Data Science Officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center as well as a Founding Fellow of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. She is the Founding Director of the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and the WIFIRE Lab. The WoRDS Center specializes in the development of methods, cyberinfrastructure, and workflows for computational data science and its translation to practical applications. The WIFIRE Lab is focused on artificial intelligence methods for an all-hazards knowledge cyberinfrastructure, becoming a management layer from the data collection to modeling efforts, and has achieved significant success in helping to manage wildfires. Since joining SDSC in 2001, she has been a principal investigator and a technical leader in a wide range of cross-disciplinary projects.

Margo Robbins is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC).  She is one of the key planners and organizers of the Cultural Burn Training Exchange (TREX) that takes place on the Yurok Reservation twice a year.  She is also a co-lead and advisor for the Indigenous People’s Burn Network.Margo comes from the traditional Yurok village of Morek, and is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe. She gathers and prepares traditional food and medicine, is a basket weaver and regalia maker. She is the Indian Education Director for the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School district, a mom, and a grandma.

Erin Eshe is co-founder and Executive Director of the research and conservation non-profit, Oceans Initiative. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland where the primary focus of her PhD research was the ecology of Pacific white-sided dolphins in the Pacific Northwest. She uses photo-identification and acoustics to learn more about the conservation status of these fascinating dolphins. She is interested in how mammal-eating killer whales (Bigg’s) may be impacting Pacific white-sided dolphin population dynamics and behavior. Her research interests include mark-recapture, ecology, conservation biology, demography, acoustics, population viability analysis, marine protected areas. Her research is motivated by a desire to use science to make tangible conservation impacts.

Claudia Renta Ortiz is the Founder of the The Tinglamigos. Claudia is a high school student from Puerto Rico. She was passionate about nature and the environment from an early age, starting her organization The Tinglamigos in middle school. Tinglamigos is a group of youth that go to the beaches of Puerto Rico to help sea turtles to their nesting and hatching process. Tinglamigos is in charge of numerous activities for young people that have to do with the protection of this species and the importance of caring for the environment.  Claudia named this group “Tinglamigos” because in Spanish, leatherback turtle is “tinglar” and the word “amigos” was added to refer to the word “friends” which in English means “leatherback turtle friends.” The group patrols the beach at night and in the morning to register any sea turtle that nests on the coasts of Puerto Rico. Additionally, they go to different municipalities in Puerto Rico to give presentations on turtle conservation, coral reef preservation, and how to care for the environment. Claudia is an aspiring researcher, already having published her research on coral reefs in a paper titled “The Thermal Stress And The Effects On Coral Bleaching.” 

Jessica Dandridge is the Executive Director of The Water Collaborative. She has dedicated her to life to community advocacy and campaign development for organizations seeking to be socially, economically and culturally inclusive. Through socially innovative engagement strategies, Ms. Dandridge has cultivated spaces for learning and the advancement of campaigns through collaboration, risk mitigation,
and resource mobilization. Ms. Dandridge received her B.A at Xavier University in Political Science and her M.A in International Affairs with a concentration in security in conflict The New School for Public Engagement in New York City. Since starting her career in advocacy and non-profit management at age 15, she has learned international techniques through civil rights champions and research-based models
to formulate multidisciplinary approaches to problem-solving. Since 2005, she has worked for, or in collaboration with dozens of organizations in the Greater New Orleans area including Fyre Youth Squad, Rethink, Puentes, JJPL, The Algebra Project, and Finding Our Folk.

Bryn Lindblad’s experience in forging and facilitating cross-sector collaborations for greater climate resilience serves her well in this strategic leadership position. Before moving to Los Angeles, Bryn worked as a policy analyst and consultant in Copenhagen, Denmark, where her primary focus were on life cycle-oriented governance mechanisms and integrated natural resource management. Before moving to Europe’s green capital for the COP15 climate conference, Bryn worked with the non-partisan Twin Cities nonprofit Citizen League on fostering new forms of civic engagement to inform public policy decisions. Bryn was on Capital Hill before that, working on Senator Amy Klobuchar’s environmental policy team, helping to prepare the freshman senator for committee hearings and draft legislation with bipartisan appeal. Bryn has also worked on the regulatory side of environmental protection in the Bureau of Intergovernmental Affairs at NYC’s Dept. of Env. Protection, where water supply and wastewater management were the main concerns. She has a Masters in Technological and Socio-Economic Planning from Roskilde University (Denmark), and a BA in Political Science, Public Policy, and Environmental Studies from Swarthmore College.

Hannah Feuer (she/her) is deeply passionate about alternative ways to address the climate crisis and surface new futures – something she believes is only possible through radical imagination. Professionally, her career touches on various sectors, with a through-line on transitioning towards a more equitable and climate-just future. She has worked in multiple avenues of the green transition (vertical farming start-up, environmental non-profit, impact investing, political campaigns) and currently lives in London working at an impact production company that aims to change policy around climate and social justice issues through media and storytelling. 

She received her BA in International Relations from Bowdoin College and recently completed an MSc at University College London in Environmental Studies. While there she completed a dissertation titled: “Worldbuilding Out of The Climate Crisis – Radical Imaginaries Through Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism”. Concerned by the lack of hopeful and visionary solutions to the crisis and interested in the potential for more radical and imaginative ways to build our communities, she interviewed BIPOC youth climate activists, Afrofuturist and Indigenous Futurist authors, and worldbuilders to understand how worldbuilding could help envision radical system change and seed a pluriverse of hopeful and equitable futures.

Hannah will support the collective’s creative work.

The One Humanity Writing Collective along with some of the original creators Showrunners of the One Humanity world will work over the next six-months along with the Brain Trust members to create unique storytelling across multimedia that addresses the global climate crisis challenges through science fiction and fantasy.

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