Mwalim (MJ Peters), MS, MFA is an interdisciplinary scholar, performer, and cultural historian whose work bridges academia, music, and theatre. He is a tenured Associate Professor of English and Black Studies at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he teaches courses in African Diasporic and Indigenous expressive traditions, folklore, oral history, and creative writing. His scholarship and creative practice explore the cultural politics of sound, space, memory, and community. He is also a citizen and elder of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

Mwalim is a founding member of WAMPTRONICA, a nine-member underground dance music collective blending Deep Afro Jazz House, soul, funk, and Indigenous musical traditions. As a DJ and producer, he helps curate immersive dance experiences rooted in the history of Black, Latino, and LGBTQ underground club culture. He also co-produces and co-hosts the weekly radio show and podcast From the Underground with WAMPTRONICA, which highlights deep, soulful, and globally influenced house music (https://rss.com/podcasts/fromtheundergroundwith-wamptronica/).

He is the Founding Artistic Director of Oversoul Theatre Collective, Inc., a nonprofit arts organization formed in 1994, and dedicated to expanding access to performance and media arts while amplifying Black and Indigenous voices through theatre and community-based creative work.

In the classroom, Mwalim brings together scholarship, artistic practice, and lived cultural experience to create spaces of thoughtful inquiry and dynamic exchange. His teaching invites students to listen closely, think critically;  through conversation, storytelling, and critical analysis, engaged participants leave with a deeper appreciation for the ways art, history, and social life remain profoundly interconnected.

Alston Brown is an actor, writer, director, and producer originally from Atlanta, GA and a proud Cape washashore. He has appeared in and contributed to numerous productions in NYC and across the country, including Trinity Rep, Naked Angels, The Wild Project, New Dramatists, Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, Provincetown Theater, Mason Street Warehouse, Sleeping Weasel, and Salvage Art Productions. He has produced films that have appeared at Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Baltimore Film Festival. Film/TV credits include “Observe and Report”, “The Enemy Within”, “Little Sister”, “High Tide”, “Applesauce.” Alston is a graduate of the Brown/Trinity MFA Program.. 

Indira Ganesan is the author of three novels, The Journey, Inheritance, and As Sweet as Honey. She was born in Srirangam, India, and grew up in St. Louis, MO, and Rockland County, NY. She held fellowships from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, The MacDowell Colony, The Paden Institute for Writers of Color, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has taught at UCSan Diego, UCSanta Cruz, Naropa University, CUBoulder, and LIU. She now teaches fiction at Emerson College,  reviews non-fiction books for Phi Beta Kappa’s online magazine, The Key Reporter, and hosts Namaste, a weekly global music program on Cape Cod community radio, WOMR/WFMR.  Her website is indiraganesan.com.