Keynote Speakers

Patti Gonia

Collaboration with The Good Mule Project and Multicultural Affairs Speaker Series.

Pattie Gonia (she/her) is an advocate for the environment, for inclusivity and diversity in the outdoors, and for the LGBTQ+ community. The Pattie Gonia community exists to uplift LGBTQ people and allies in the outdoors and to exist as a platform to give other voices and organizations all the shine in the world. Out of heels, Wyn Wiley (he/him) is a 27 year old born and raised Nebraskan, a professional photographer, speaker, educator, and creative director for major brands as well as a number of non-profits around the world. Wyn has a long history of working with youth and youth focused non-profits.

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Alex Myers

Collaboration with Multicultural Affairs Speaker Series Presents: Continental Divide

Alex's novel Continental Divide tells the story of a transgender Harvard student who’s cut off from his family, journeys West, and finds adventure, danger, and romance in Wyoming. The novel explores gender and masculinity in the West, and the experience of navigating across geographies and cultures as a transgender person. The book is based, in part, on Myers’ own real-life experience in Wyoming, where he lived and worked for a summer outside Cody in 1997.

Alex Myers is the author of Revolutionary, Continental Divide, and The Story of Silence. He is a transgender advocate and educator who works to promote gender inclusion and helps schools support transgender students. You can find more information about Alex and his writing at his website.

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Rinku Sen

Thursday Lunch

Rinku Sen is the former President and Executive Director of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation and the Publisher of the award-winning news site Colorlines. Race Forward brings systemic analysis and an innovative approach to complex race issues to help people take effective action toward racial equity through research, media, and practice.

Under Sen’s leadership, Race Forward has generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes. One example is the groundbreaking Shattered Families report, which changed the immigration debate with research on how record deportations of parents were leading to the placement of thousands of children in foster care, often separating them permanently from their families. Sen was the architect of Drop the I-Word, a campaign for media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal,” resulting in the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many more outlets dropping the i-word, affecting millions of readers every day.

A visionary and a pragmatist, Sen is one of the leading voices in the racial justice movement, building upon the legacy of civil rights by transforming the way we talk about race, from something that is individual, intentional, and overt to something that is systemic, unconscious, and hidden. Prior to her work at Race Forward, Rinku served in leadership roles for over a decade at the revolutionary Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), where she trained new organizers of color and crafted public policy campaigns. Sen’s cutting edge book Stir it Up, read widely by community organizers and taught on campuses across the country, theorized a model of community organizing that integrate a political analysis of gender, class, poverty, sexuality, and other issues.

Sen’s second book The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization told the story of Moroccan immigrant Fekkak Mamdouh, who co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York in the aftermath of September 11 and is currently being made into a film.

Rinku is the Co-Chair of the Schott Foundation for Public Education and sits on the boards of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Working America, and the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. A highly sought-after keynote speaker for colleges Sen has spoken at Harvard, Brown, University of Michigan, Penn State, and was the Commencement Speaker at Antioch New England.