Mansoor Adayfi is a writer, advocate, and former Guantánamo Bay prisoner. He spent nearly fifteen years without charge in U.S. custody, including eight years in solitary confinement. Originally from Yemen, he was released to Serbia in 2016. Since then, he has focused on continuing his education and on writing about his experiences. Adayfi's writings have been published in The New York Times. These include "In Our Prison on the Sea" and "Taking Marriage Class at Guantánamo Bay." He is also author of the essay "Did We Survive Torture?", which is included in the edited volume Witnessing Torture; Perspectives of Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers (2018). Hachette Books is the publisher of his 2021 memoir, Don't Forget Us Here .

Moazzam Begg is a British-born Muslim, he is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and Outreach Director for CAGE. After his release, he became one of the most prominent public-speakers and Muslim advocates for justice and dialogue. He is the author of the best-seller Enemy Combatant in which he recounts his experience as an innocent man detained and tortured at Guantanamo, Bagram and Kandahar. The Muslim 500 listed him as one of the 500 "most influential Muslims" in the world. The New Statesman's listed him in the top 50 "Heroes of our time". He has travelled extensively to investigate state abuses and western complicity in torture including to Tunisia, Libya, and Syria. A direct eye-witness to the conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Syria, his life has been recorded by the Columbia University Oral History Project, and the BBC Storyville documentary The Confession.

Behrouz Boochani is an award-winning Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. He currently serves as an Associate Professor in Social Sciences at UNSW and is a non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC) at the University of Sydney. Boochani is an Honorary Member of PEN International and has received numerous awards for his contributions to journalism, including the Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya award. His memoir No Friend But the Mountains (Pan Macmillan 2018, trans. Omid Tofighian) was written during his seven years of incarceration by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea's Manus Island prison. His new book, Freedom, Only Freedom, was published by Bloomsbury in November 2022.

Mohamedou Houbeini is a writer, advocate, and former prisoner from Mauritania. He was detained at the U.S. government's Guantánamo Bay prison without charge for approximately fourteen years. Houbeini wrote a memoir during his incarceration, which the U.S. government declassified in 2012 with numerous redactions. An international bestseller and the first memoir to be published during the author's detention at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, was published as Guantánamo Diary in January 2015. The memoir was used as the basis for a film starring Tahar Rahim, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Jodie Foster. Titled The Mauritanian, it was released in February 2021. Slahi wrote four other books in detention, one of which he describes as being "about finding happiness in a hopeless place." In 2021, his novel The Actual True Story of Ahmed & Zarga was published by Ohio University Press in its Modern African Writers series. At the time of this writing, Houbeini is a writer-in-residence at Noord Nederlands Toneel, a Dutch theatre company. His main publications have been published under the name Mohamedou Ould Slahi.

Writer, educator and organiser, Erica R. Meiners' current books include For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (University of Minnesota 2016), a co-edited anthology The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom (Haymarket Press 2018); the co-authored Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (Verso 2020); and the co-authored Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Haymarket 2022). Meiners collaboratively started and works alongside others in a range of ongoing mobilisations for liberation, particularly movements that involve access to free public education for all, including people during and after incarceration, and other queer abolitionist struggles. A member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Death in Custody Project, the Prison+Neighborhood Arts / Education Project, and the Education for Liberation Network, Erica is a sci-fi fan, an avid runner, and a lover of bees and cats.

Alexandra S. Moore is Professor of English and Director of the Human Rights Institute and Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls at Binghamton University. Her most recent publications include the monograph, Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture (2015) and several edited collections, including Writing Beyond the State: Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights to Literature and Culture (with Samantha Pinto, 2020), Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Survivors and Human Rights Workers (with Elizabeth Swanson, 2018), and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (with Sophia A. McClennen, 2015). She publishes widely on representations of human rights violations in contemporary literature and film. Her current research is on the cultural afterlives of the rendition, detention, and interrogation programme in the war on terror.

Abdellatif Nasser was born and raised in Casablanca City, Morocco. After graduating from high school in mathematical science, he studied at the University of Science. For nearly twenty years, between 2002 and 2021, he was detained at the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was never charged with a crime or tried, but like many others, he was repeatedly interrogated, tortured, and force-fed. He turned to hunger strikes because they were the only means by which he could resist soldiers' harassment and arbitrary detention. He emerged as a block leader and for years pushed for educational opportunities for his fellow detainees. This led to his nickname, "the Minister of Education." His story was widely covered in the New York Times, the Guardian, and in the 6-part NPR series "The Other Latif." As noted in some of these reports, during his incarceration he created a handwritten bilingual (Arabic-English) dictionary that consisted of about 2,000 entries. In the two and a half years since his release, he has studied independently and completed different online courses in a variety of subjects.

María José Rubin is an editor and doctoral candidate in Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. For over ten years she has worked as an educator at the Prison Extension Programme-Programa de Extensión en Cárceles, School of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina. As part of this programme, she coordinates the Editing Collective Workshop, a course that produces several publications dedicated to circulate the writing of incarcerated students. She is a member of the Prison Writing National Meeting organisation committee and develops academic research on prison writing, publication, and education. She has published papers on these topics, and is co-author of Escribir en la cárcel. Prácticas y experiencias de lectura y escritura en contextos de encierro, a book on reading and writing practices in prison. As part of the Prison Extension Programme activities, she works at a project called "La Segunda," which provides educational guidance to students who were formerly incarcerated.

Barhoumi Sufyian is from Algeria. He was held in extrajudicial detention at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for almost twenty years. There he earned a reputation for his good humour, his empathy for those who suffered, and the strong command of English that he acquired during his incarceration. His repatriation from Guantánamo Bay was arranged during the Obama administration but then delayed for about five years. He was reunited with his family in 2022 and is working hard to rebuild his life; he is committed to living a life based on honesty, kindness, and forgiveness. However, the stigma associated with his incarceration is difficult to overcome, and his subjection to various forms of suffering that were induced by his incarceration at Guantánamo is ongoing.

Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. Professor Young is the author of Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII, and Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, as well as co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, the Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC) and the Migration and Asylum Lab (MAL) at Stanford University. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 600 asylum cases.

Roberta Maierhofer is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Center for Inter-American Studies (C.IAS) at the University of Graz, Austria. From 1999 to 2011, she held a series of Vice-Rector positions for International Relations (1999-2003), International Relations and Affirmative Action for Women (2003-2007), and International Relations and Interdisciplinary Cooperation (2007-2011). In 2000, she initiated and established the focus area South-Eastern Europe at the University of Graz. This expertise of regional and interregional collaboration was fundamental for her leadership role at the Center for Inter-American Studies, which she has been directing since February 2007, and determined how the University of Graz established a second regional focus area in terms of North-, Central- and South America in 2012. She also acts as a co-advisor in terms of the Joint Degree in English and American Studies. Since 2004, she has been directing the Graz International Summer School Seggau, which was established as an interdisciplinary and intercultural platform in the fields of European and Inter-American Studies.

Don E. Walicek is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico's Río Piedras Campus. He earned a BA in Cultural Anthropology and an MA in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He was awarded his PhD in English from the University of Puerto Rico. Much of his research has focus on issues of language, migration, and social life in the Caribbean, in particular Anguilla, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. His publications include Guantánamo and American Empire: The Humanities Respond (2018) and an issue of the Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso titled,"Guantánamo: What's Next?",both of which he co-edited with Jessica Adams. In 2019, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He has acted as editor of the journal Sargasso since 2009.

Nicole Haring is postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests focus on feminist theory, contemporary US-American literature, Inter-American studies, aging and intergenerational studies, and critical pedagogies. She has had a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Oklahoma (2019-2020), the Elisabeth-List-Fellowship for Gender Studies at the University of Graz (2020-2021) and recently finished her DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Science where she worked on intergenerational storytelling on gender and education (2021-2023). Currently, her research focuses on social reproduction theory, eco-criticism and environmental humanities. She is the lead researcher in the Erasmus+ project "Eco-Storytelling" and has been the academic assistant of the Graz International Summer School Seggau (GUSEGG) since 2022. Additionally, she was the co-organizer of the 2022 Graz camps conference.

Christian Cwik is a historian for Latin American and Caribbean. He graduated from the University of Vienna, where he earned a PhD in history and philosophy with an emphasis on African and Jewish Diaspora, Slave-trade and slavery as well as Shoa-history. Before joining the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz in 2019 he was lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago, invited professor at the University of Havana, the University of Cartagena de Indias in Colombia and professor for Colonial Ibero-American history at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela in Caracas. Furthermore, he was substitute professor at Cologne and Erfurt University in Germany. About interment and repression during the Shoa and aftermath he has published several books and articles among them Las relaciones bilaterales en perspectiva histórica, 1504-2017 (2019) and Diktaturen im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges (with Hans-Joachim König and Stefan Rinke 2020).

Bilgin Ayata is a professor for Southeastern European Studies at the Centre for Southeastern European Studies at the University of Graz. Her research centres on socio-political transformation processes with a focus on migration, borders, affect and emotions. She is project leader of the NOMIS Research project "Elastic Borders- Rethinking the borders of the 21st Century". She has published widely on affective politics, displacement, diasporas, citizenship, memory and genocide denial and foreign policy. Her SNF Funded research project on "Affective Citizenship: Religion, Migration and Belonging in Europe" examined the relationship between religious incorporation and belonging. Her SNIS funded project "Infrastructure space and the future of Migration Management" explored the infrastructure of migration control. Ayata is co-speaker of the Cluster "Migration, Borders and Mobility" at the Field of Excellence "Dimensions of Europe" at the University of Graz and has been DFG-Mercator Fellow of the SFB 1171 "Affective Societies" at the FU Berlin (2019-2023).