CONTRIBUTORS
Lama rod owens
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceLama Rod Owens is a Black Buddhist Southern Queen. An international influencer with a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School with a focus on the intersection of social change, identity, and spiritual practice. Author of The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors and Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger and co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, his teachings center on freedom, self-expression, and radical self-care. Highly sought after for talks, retreats, and workshops, his mission is showing you how to heal and free yourself.
A leading voice in a new generation of Buddhist teachers with over 11 years of experience, Lama Rod is highly respected among his peers and the communities that he serves. “It can be confusing for people to see Tantric Buddhist teachings coming from someone who’s Black and queer, southern, and fat, but I love it. It's who I am.” he says. From these intersections, he creates a platform that’s very natural, engaging, and inclusive.
Applauded for his mastery in balancing weighty topics with a sense of lightness while still speaking truth to power, this Queen has been featured by CNN, Good Morning America, BBC, The Washington Post, PBS, NPR, Ebony, and more.
ARIEL SZABO
CLM Editions: Mossy Space, Ancient Luxuries, AudacityAriel Szabo is a somatic sex educator, writer, and advocate based in Los Angeles. Through her lived experience as a sex worker and trafficked person, she is devoted to shifting how society relates to sex, power, and healing - positioning sexual awakening as a force for personal and collective transformation.
Her work weaves sacred intimacy, relational healing, and nervous system repair, informed by years of study with plant medicines and Indigenous wisdom keepers in Peru alongside training in somatic sex education, sexological bodywork, and psychedelic therapy.
She teaches practitioners embodied leadership through The Art of Holding and guides couples into deeper intimacy through Divine Union for Lovers.
Ariel holds space for individuals, couples, and groups with deep attunement and trust in the body's innate wisdom. Her work restores the erotic as a source of vitality, belonging, and remembrance. She writes about sexuality, power, and liberation at The Erotic Frontier on Substack.
Ámate Cecilia Pérez
CLM Editions: Mossy Space, Ancient LuxuriesÁmate Cecilia Pérez is an indigenous Nahua person from Kuzcatlan(El Salvador) and the founding director of the Latinx Racial Equity Project and Decolonizing Race. She is also a race equity and liberation trainer, an organizational development consultant, and a writer. Ms. Perez and her family fled the Salvadoran civil war in the early 1980’s. Ámate Perez is queer, a martial artist and a mother. She now lives in Marin County, CA on unseeded and occupied Coast Miwok and Tamal-ko Indian territory, where she does activism to rematriate the land to its original stewards.
Danielle Coates-connor
CLM Editions: Mossy Space, Ancient Luxuries, AudacityDanielle Coates-Connor created Crush Life Manifesto out of need and desire. Danielle is a creative director, storyteller, and strategist whose work centers on cultivating authentic voice by stripping away conditioning, uncovering truth and desire, and practicing bravery.
Danielle is the founder and creative director of Infinite Growth, a design firm serving change-makers. Their leadership framework, Holistic Vision, has supported innovators around the world in making values-aligned decisions and conjuring solutions that once felt impossible. With deep experience in climate justice, immigrant rights, racial equity, global women’s empowerment, and civic engagement, Danielle’s work spans award-winning documentary film, photography, writing, podcasts, and immersive video installation.
Logina mostafa
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceGina Mostafa, MPH, founded queering existentialism in the winter of 2023. Their academic background is in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and they earned their Masters Degree in Public Health Policy in 2021, where they focused on the intersections of bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, and equity in access to psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.
Between 2015 and 2019, they worked as a political organizer for Planned Parenthood and as violence-prevention educator at the University of Iowa, facilitating workshops on consent, healthy relationships and dismantling rape culture, in addition to volunteering as an abortion doula for a local feminist clinic. After completing their MPH, they focused mental health interventions on a community level, volunteering for various organizations in the psychedelic space such as the Psychedelic Sisterhood and the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society. Professionally, they have experience as a researcher, facilitator, and educator at organizations such as the NYC Department of Health, Mount Sinai, and NYU’s School of Global Public Health, on topics including sexual health care access and education, as well as mindfulness as a mental health intervention. Currently, they work on the intersections of digital equity and access to critical services such as healthcare and education.
Lawrence barriner ii
CLM Editions: Mossy Space, Audacitylawrence barriner ii (he/him) is Black, queer, spiritual, and always learning. He is the son of a pastor and a teacher, was raised in the US South, and has lived on occupied Pawtucket and Massachusett lands since 2007(ish). He most values love/justice, community, and transformation.
His paid work includes facilitation, coaching, training, and consulting for social, environmental, and land justice movements and organizations.
His unpaid work includes (r)evolutionary uncling, community-focused healing, and creating post-patriarchal futures. He is working towards a world that includes liberation for and right relationship between all beings.
He shares writing via his newsletter (lqb2weekly.substack.com) and his blog (lqb2.co/blog). He also is a lover of awful puns (lqb2puns.tumblr.com) and is a founding stewarding member of the Movement Retreat Center (AKA Bent Birch).
Chad rand
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceChad Rand is a system-impacted poet, writer, and advocate. He was incarcerated for nearly 13 years before being released on parole. He earned his BA in theatre and English behind bars, and now works for the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois, providing resources to others as they make the long journey home from prison.
“I’d like people to know that incarcerated people are human beings just like the rest of us. I met some of my best friends on the inside, and I saw as much creativity, compassion and wisdom behind bars as anywhere else in my life. We fall in love, we suffer, we laugh, and we mourn.
Almost everyone in prison will come home one day, and society should think about the kind of support they should be giving to their future neighbors and colleagues. Many incarcerated people are not guilty of what they’ve been accused of, and regardless, no one should be defined by the worst moments in their lives. Our country supports a system built to dehumanize everyone connected with it, and we should all reflect on what that says about our culture and society.”
jungwon kim
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceJungwon Kim is a writer and cultural worker who explores intergenerational trauma, grief, and healing.
She researches and produces traditional and contemporary rituals to transmute han (한)—a Korean word for the embodied experience of accumulated grief and rage resulting from historical violence. She is specifically interested in modalities that alleviate han through a kind of joyful catharsis Koreans refer to as heung, as well as the deep and loving web of kinship, responsibility, and care known as jeong.
With the support of the Soros Equality Fellowship, Jungwon is currently developing an event series that explores the cross-cultural resonance of han in collaboration with artists and cultural practitioners whose families have suffered the direct impacts of historical violence. The project, called Unbind Your Heart, recognizes grief as a portal to solidarity. It uplifts music, movement, art, ceremony, food, and togetherness as potent ancestral tools that can help us liberate ourselves from the dangerous manifestations of unresolved generational trauma. They also exemplify communal creativity as prayer and practice for the collective future so many of us yearn for.
Kendra LarA
CLM Editions: Mossy Space, Ancient LuxuriesKendra is a proud first-generation Black Dominican woman, a mother, and an artist. Born in the Bronx to a working-class, immigrant mother, Kendra’s family relocated to Jamaica Plain and has since called it home.
Before becoming the first person of color to represent District Six on the Boston City Council, Kendra was the Director of Radical Philanthropy at the historic Boston-based organization Resist. Founded by world-renowned activist Noam Chomsky just over 50 years ago, Resist grew — with Lara at the helm — into a leading force for racial and economic justice. Anchored by a socialist vision and a commitment to bring the margins to the center, Kendra uses her head, heart, and hands to push communities and local governments to use their imaginations and the resources at hand to expand beyond the realms of possibility towards liberation.
Bhav Nancherla
CLM Editions: Mossy Space Bhav Nancherla mostly moves in this world as a somatic practitioner, facilitator, and parent - held and shaped especially by generative somatics and Training for Change. They've moved in a range of roles and spaces over the last 2 decades: non-profit operations, anti-violence & sexuality rights movements, radical childcare collective organizing, full-spectrum doula support, and peer sex health education, to name a few.
These days, they feel very lucky to be deepening relationship with spirit for both the day-to-day and collective scale, and as parent - humbled and moved by the practice of unconditional love. Bhav longs to be of service in ways that reestablish the dignity and resourced flow of care, and especially for revitalizing channels for our grief.
Anna-Maria D’Cruz
CLM Editions: Mossy Space, Ancient LuxuriesAnna-Maria D’Cruz, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary care practitioner, facilitator, and creative. A trained clinical psychologist, Anna-Maria grounds her practice in the principles of healing justice. She supports individuals and collectives in radically transforming their relationships with themselves, each other, and the world around them to build more expansive, just and sustainable futures. Anna-Maria believes sovereignty over our creative bodies is a human need, and is critical in order to vision and manifest these new worlds. See her offerings.
G Christo
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceIn addition to being a stand-up comdian, G is a yoga practitioner who believes movement, meditation, and somatic practice are how we come home to our most authentic selves.
G is an expert fundraiser and seasoned strategist. In the first decade of their career, G. has raised nearly $4 million dollars for women, women of color, and LGBTQ candidates and organizations who are committed to structural change.
Marla Renee Stewart
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceMarla Renee Stewart, MA (she/her) is an award-winning certified sexologist, sexual strategist, intimacy/relationship/sex coach, educator, speaker, and author. She is the owner of Velvet Lips, a sexuality education company that focuses on people to help them integrate seduction, develop their communication abilities, and enhancing their sex skills. As a faculty member at Clayton State University, she teaches Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies. As the Co-Founder of the Sex Down South Conference, Marla aims to bring diverse groups together to learn and share their experiences in the essence of being authentic and fostering sexual liberation across communities.
Beya Jiménez
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceBeya Jiménez is a leader and innovator working with organizations and individuals committed to repairing the harms of the past in order to build a more connected future rooted in people, equity, and justice.
Her path soon took her abroad in search of connection, culture, and new models of equity. In Copenhagen, she led a transit equity project that became a turning point, revealing how thoughtful public policy can meaningfully support everyday people. In Cartagena, she was inspired by a collective of artists to write about creative pathways for reviving marginalized neighborhoods. Back in Boston, she led a group of activists in forming a coalition that connected neighbors and residents to address the housing crisis. Across borders, Beya identified shared threads of thriving, equitable communities: responsive governments and businesses, vibrant civic and social spaces for connection, and the courage to engage in reparative planning rooted in systemic equity.
Caffyn Jesse
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceCaffyn Jesse is a queer elder, sacred intimate, teacher and writer who revels in the power and pleasures of the erotic. They are a renowned teacher of sex, intimacy and healing trauma with pleasure. Encouraging neuroplastic change to support sexual healing and expanded pleasure, unwinding sexual trauma, exploring the intersection of sex and spirit, creating erotic community are all core to their work and play. Caffyn is a tireless advocate of embodied love.
Caffyn offers an online program on The Art and Science of Sacred Intimacy. They also offer a program on psychedelic medicine integration.
Linnea Reyes-LaMon
CLM Editions: Mossy Space, Ancient LuxuriesLinnea Reyes-LaMon is a Black American artist from southern California, now based in New York City. Having received a B.S. in Mathematics and B.A. in Global Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, and a M.A.T. in Mathematics from Bard College, Reyes-LaMon creates books and visual art exploring several themes. She has taken courses at Carnegie Mellon University, Berklee College of Music, Rhode Island School of Design and the Center for Book Arts to advance her artistic practice.
Starting her creative career as a drummer, she performed in The Oral History of Female Drummers by Tom Tom Magazine at MoMA PS 1, Brooklyn Museum, and The Knockdown Center. Her studies of mathematics and love for geometry have heavily influenced her approach to both music and visual art. She has created music-inspired visual patterns and works highlighting mathematical concepts related to her lessons as a high school geometry teacher.
Since becoming a parent during the pandemic, Reyes-LaMon has explored themes of playfulness, queerness and motherhood using digital illustration and collage. Currently, Reyes-LaMon is tapping into a childhood pleasure of bookmaking as she creates zines about her personal growth, binds sketchbooks and journals.
Ash Lee
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceAsh is a transmasc and nonbinary Korean-American community organizer in New York City (he/they). He produces SuciaQueer, a sex-positive grassroots community centering queer and trans BIPOC individuals through monthly play parties, workshops and health-equity driven collaborations. Aside from community organizing, Ash has built an extensive marketing career in growing brands and executing DEI strategies with organizations like LVMH and L’Oréal. Ash shamelessly represents their nontraditional identities in every space they enter and at the end of the day, humanizing and bringing people together with respect and appreciation of each other’s differences fulfills them most
Erin Coates-Connor
CLM Editions: Mossy Space, Ancient LuxuriesErin is sex-positive nature lover, plant enthusiast, and dog mama. Her passion is fostering sexually liberated cultures. She brings the rigor of a scientist, experimenting and finding methods that work for people to find safety and power in their intimate experiences. Aspiring to be your friendly neighborhood polyamory coach, Erin brings joy, patience, care, and queer magic.
Eli Feghali
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceEli Feghali is an Arab immigrant from Beirut, Lebanon whose parents, Romy and Bernard, fled their homeland when he was two to escape civil war. Eli organized in Tennessee in the migrant justice movement, then on the streets of Boston during the Occupy Wall Street uprising. It was on those streets that he was introduced to cooperatives and the idea of the solidarity economy.
For more than a decade, Eli has worked with the New Economy Coalition (NEC), a network building the power of the solidarity economy movement in the US. Through his roles at NEC, Beautiful Solutions, and the board of YES! Magazine, Eli works to tell the story of another world under construction. Eli and Rachel live together in Cambridge, MA with their daughter Maya Silver.
Rachel Plattus
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceRachel Plattus is an edge dancer, web tender, and tunnel dweller. She’s been a facilitator, organizer and educator in early childhood classrooms, local electoral campaigns, communities of Jewish mystics and healers, rooms of white folks unlearning whiteness, retreat centers, resistance in the streets; in multiracial campaigns for climate, racial and economic justice; and at New Economy Coalition, PeoplesHub, Nuns & Nones, Taproot, Tzedek Lab, the Retreat Center Collaboration, and the Movement Sustainability Commons, among others.
Rachel comes from people who gather people, who know that no problem is too big for a kitchen table, who pray in the woods and the water and watching the winged ones, who shape change on the side of life in the face of cultures of death. Rachel and Eli live in Cambridge, MA in a house full of organizers, healers, beekeepers, builders, and meditators with their favorite person, Maya Silver.
Christine Cordero
CLM Editions: Mossy SpaceAs a facilitator, trainer, speaker, and strategist with over 25 years of experience in social change work, Christine has organized and built coalitions across groups and issues, including environmental health and justice, workers' rights, and economic justice. She was Co-Director at Asian Pacific Environmental Network, organizing with immigrants and refugees for a healthy environment and thriving economy for all communities. She also served as Executive Director at the Center for Story-based Strategy, training 2,000+ people and working with 200+ groups to (re)invigorate narrative strategies for social change.
Christine is an alumnus of Rockwood Institute’s Leading from the Inside Out Yearlong Fellowship, one of the nation’s leading executive leadership programs for experienced social change trailblazers. She is one of three recipients of Stanford University Centers for Equity, Community, and Leadership’s 2024 Changemaker Award. She is a 2024-2026 EJ Disrupt Design fellow with the New School Tishman Environment and Design Center. Christine is an ordained priest of the Chozen-ji line of Rinzai Zen, and trains in Oakland, CA and Kalihi Valley, HI.
tia marie
CLM Editions: Mossy Spacetia marie is a cultural strategist, writer, and producer working at the intersection of narrative, media, intimacy, and social impact. Her work centers ethical storytelling, community rooted leadership, and building systems that prioritize care, consent, and sustainability on screen and beyond it.
Over the past decade, she has worked across television, film, live convenings, and wellness, helping shape narratives while creating safer, more inclusive environments for the people inside them. She brings a systems level lens to storytelling and believes how stories are made matters just as much as what they say.
She co founded Sex Down South in 2014, a long running sex positive conference created for People of the Global Majority and 2SLGBTQIA communities. The conference has convened thousands of attendees through education, film, and community centered programming grounded in healing justice and lived experience.