Bennett, Amanda: - Dr. Amanda Bennett (she/her) is a poet, cultural critic, and conjurer of queer Black feminist futures, raised by the South and rooted in Atlanta. Her work-grounded in spirit, theory, and survival-has appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Murder Journal, Triangle Poetry 2021, and Feminist Making, Sensing, and Doing. She is the founder of define&empower, a collective and consultancy dedicated to worldmaking through education at the intersections of identity, imagination, and justice. Her Substack, Woo in the Real World, is an altar of essays and invocations where spirituality meets scholarship.Bennett holds a PhD in Literature and Cultural Studies from Duke University, where she created zines with students, facilitated poetry workshops, and led Black feminism reading groups that bridged the classroom and community. Her writing is an offering-tender, insurgent, and always reaching toward liberation, love, and the sacred in the everyday.