Atava Garcia Swiecicki (she/her/ella) is the author of The Curanderx Toolkit:  Reclaiming Ancestral Herbal Medicine and Rituals for Healing.  Atava is guided by her dreams, the plants, and her ancestors.   Atava studied healing arts extensively for over thirty years and has been mentored by herbalists, curanderas and traditional knowledge keepers.  She currently works as a clinical herbalist, teacher, and medicine maker.  She also loves helping people build relationships with plants, whom she considers some of our greatest teachers and healers.  She was the founder and steward of Ancestral Apothecary School of Herbal, Folk and Indigenous Medicine in Huchiun/Oakland for over 20 years.  She relocated to New Mexico in 2020 where she lives with her wife and her cat is learning how to garden in the high desert and dreaming up her next book. www.ancestralapothecary.com / IG: @curanderxtoolkit

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a diviner, rootworker, clinical herbalist, and poet from Piscataway, New Jersey. He runs balm in gilead herb shop in Kingston, New York. He has been reading cards for twenty-four years. He is the author of four books and one chapbook, including SLINGSHOT, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and WATCHNIGHT, which won the James Laughlin Award from Academy of American Poets. He has a black cat named Brad. 

Simone Lee Sobers (she/her and they/them)  is a Black, queer, disabled, femme community builder and artist. They are passionate about developing ways we can bring our full selves into liberatory movement work, integrating abolition, anticapitalism, disability and healing justice with cultural work and ancestral magic. A daughter of no place and many places, she continues to find home with those who share her politic & practices; who move in recognition of the scars of colonialism and the scam of borders, and who fight for the self determination of our people. Currently based in Lenapehoking, Philadelphia and Dakar Senegal. Simone is recentering in her practitioner work in herbalism, somatics, yoga and community archiving.

Myrna [they/she] is a queer Boricua cultural and healing justice organizer moved by the power of plants and music.  They grew up eating mangos, listening to records, being doused in agua florida and seeing her mother grow plants in small urban spaces. Since 2014, Myrna has been facilitating collective care, ancestral herbalism and crisis response plant medicine offerings.  Myrna founded Sánate Boricua, a crew on the west coast of Boriken that creates accessible healing spaces for elders, houseless, poor and cuir/trans folks. She knows intimately the experiences of being a working class, survivor, caregiver, living with chronic pain and fatigue.  Myrna’s newest passion is learning how to surf.  

Nicole Rose (she/her) is an anarchist and herbalist based in the West Country of England who has been active in struggles for human, animal and earth liberation for over two decades. Her lineages are English, Welsh and Irish. Nicole did a a 3.5 year prison sentence aged 21 amidst a decade of state repression against the campaign to close down Europe’s largest animal testing company. She’s been supporting loved ones in prison for twenty years and founded the Solidarity Apothecary, a project supplying free plant medicines to people experiencing and recovering from state violence and repression. Nicole is the author of Herbalism and State Violence, The Prisoner’s Herbal, Overcoming Burnout and the Medicinal Herb Colouring Book and hosts the Frontline Herbalism Podcast.