Alex Postman

Alex Postman is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York, who specializes in impact-focused storytelling. Alex is currently a Deputy Editor at Yolo journal, bringing experience from previous roles at Chantecaille Beaute, as features director at Condé Nast Traveler, editor-in-chief at Whole Living, and
executive editor at Elle US. Alex holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature/Letters from Amherst College.

Devin O’Neill

Devin O’Neill founded O’Neill Rose Architects over a decade ago, and leads projects across the United States. Devin holds a Bachelors degree from Yale University and a Masters of Architecture from Yale School of Architecture, where he received the Moulton Andrus Award for Excellence in the Collaboration of Art and Architecture. Devin studied sculpture at Bennington College and architecture at the London Architectural Association School of Architecture. Devin has over twenty years of design and construction experience.

Devin has led many of O’Neill Rose Architects’ numerous award winning projects, including Undermountain House, which received the 2018 BSA Design Excellence Award and the 2017 SARA Design Excellence award, and the Choy House, which received the 2016 Architizer A+ Award, the 2016
AIANY Merit Award, the 2015 Asia Pacific Architecture & Design Trophy Award for best International Architecture. Choy House was recently featured in the exhibit ‘Making Room; Housing for a Changing America’ at the National Building Museum and will be included in the forthcoming book of the same title. 

Faith Rose 

Faith Rose is principal at O’Neill Rose Architects, an award winning design firm with projects ranging from masterplans and public works to single family dwellings. She received her Masters of Architecture from Yale University and her Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College. From 2004 to 2014 Faith directed New York City's Design Excellence Program at the Department of Design and Construction under the Bloomberg Administration. In 2014 Mayor de Blasio appointed Faith Executive Director of New York City’s Public Design Commission, which reviews and approves capital projects on city owned property, including architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and industrial design.

Faith has written and spoken widely about the design of public spaces.  She has participated in the Mayor’s Institute on City Design in 2018 and 2016, and the MAS Summit ‘The City We Want.’ She recently co-authored ‘Mapping Community; Public Investment in New York City’, a publication based on an exhibit she co-curated of the same name.

Faith has been recognized for her leadership in the profession.  She has been awarded both AIANY Public Architect Award and the AIANYS President’s Award.  Faith has taught and lectured at design institutions including Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design and Temple University.  From 2015-2019 Faith was the Secretary of the Board of the Architect’s Institute of America New York Chapter, and is a former board member of the Gemini Arts Initiative.

Rone Shavers

Rone Shavers is author of the experimental Afrofuturist novel Silverfish (Clash Books), a finalist for the 2021 Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Firecracker Award in Fiction and one of The Brooklyn Rail’s “Best Books of 2020.” He writes in multiple literary genres and his work has appeared in numerous journals, including Action Spectacle, Another Chicago Magazine, Big Other, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, PANK, and The Vestal Review. He has been honored with the Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers and Mentoring Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a Nancy B. Negley Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, and an Arthur T. Schwab Poet-in-Residence fellowship at MacDowell. Shavers has also received artist-in-residence fellowships to the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Loghaven Artist Residency, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VCCA France, and several other locales. His most recent creative work is Ten Crônicas, a chapbook collection of prose poems, published by The Magnificent Field in 2021.

Shavers is fiction and hybrid genre editor at the award-winning journal, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and his critical essays and reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as American Book Review, The Critical Flame, Electronic Book Review, Fiction Writers Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. Additionally, Shavers co-curated, with Gallery Director Judie Gilmore, and wrote the catalog for the 2019 art exhibition titled, “In Place of Now: Established and Emerging Artists Explore Black Identity through an Afrofuturist Lens,” which featured the artwork of Willie Cole, Renee Cox, and Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, among others, and took place at the Opalka Galley of Sage College in Albany, NY.

Shavers is Associate Professor of English at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has previously taught courses at The College of Saint Rose, the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. In spring 2024, Shavers will serve a one-semester visiting appointment as the McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina.

Laura McKellar

Laura McKellar is a Public Health Nurse with the Suffolk County Department of Health Servies and is currently working on her Masters in Public Health at Stony Brook University. Laura has long been fascinated by the intersection of infectious diseases, human social behavior and public health policy and interventions. These interests, along with her passion for improving the quality of people's lives, drew her to make a mid-life career change to Nursing. She graduated from Stony Brook University's School of Nursing in 2016 and worked briefly as a Labor and Delivery Nurse before taking her current position. In graduate school, Laura has focused on understanding how community health at a neighborhood level is related to social efficacy and the built environment.

For the last 18 years, Laura has served on the Town of Huntington environmental Conservation Board and as the chairperson of the town’s Trails Committee, where she has collaborated with the Town Board, the planning department, and the public to designate new trails and to create a town trails guide. This past year, she joined the town Environmental and Open Space and Park Fund committee, which makes funding recommendations to the Town Board regarding acquisition of open space, park improvements and neighborhood enhancement. Prior to Nursing, Laura worked in documentary films and television for ten years, and she spent five years working in a Long Island wildlife clinic and education center.