Spencer Bennington is a Danville, VA native who earned his BA in English Literature at Averett University, MA of American Literature at Radford University, and PhD of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of South Florida. Spencer's love of writing is what originally drove him to study English, and his love of teaching writing--in all forms--is what keeps him working at the university. From first-year composition, to creative writing, to professional and technical communication, Dr. B does it all!

In addition to teaching writing, Spencer is heavily involved in the interdisciplinary research field of Martial Arts Studies. His practice-based research of Tae Kwon Do has been presented internationally and published in peer-reviewed publications like the Florida English Journal and Rhetoric Review (forthcoming). More information about Spencer's efforts to bring together academics, martial artists, and community activists toward antiracist, antiviolent, social justice efforts can be found on his personal website, rhetoricalroundhouse.com

Kimberly D. Clark, is the director of the Black Cultural Center which is part of the Office for Inclusion and Diversity. She has dedicated more than 15 years to a career in higher education in academic affairs, enrollment management, and student affairs. Clark earned a Master of Arts in education with a focus on culture, curriculum, and change from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Clark is multilingual and speaks Spanish, and Twi (a Ghanaian dialect), Italian, Swiss-German, Swedish, and Mandarin.

Dr. Natalie E. Cook, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, is an Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Department of Population Health Sciences in at Virginia Tech. She is also the Faculty Principal of the Honors Residential College, where she lives and sparks curiosity, collaboration, and community among over 300 residents, from first years to graduate students. Dr. Cook is a proud two-time Hokie, having completed her MS and PhD here at Virginia Tech. Prior to returning to Tech to join the Public Health faculty, she spent a year building organizational evaluation culture and capacity as the Extension Program Evaluation Specialist at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Cook completed her BS in Human Development at Cornell University, where she discovered her passion for evaluation as an undergraduate research assistant. Her research foci include Transformative Evaluation Capacity Building, Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation, Community Based Participatory Research, birth equity, and multidirectional knowledge translation. As a transformative evaluator and critical adult educator, Dr. Cook engages in mixed methods and participatory research, and she works at the intersections of evaluation, equity, social justice, whole health, and human, family, and community development.

Brandy S. Faulkner, the Gloria D. Smith Professor of Black Studies at Virginia Tech, is also a collegiate assistant professor in the Department of Political Science.

A member of the Virginia Tech community since 2012, Faulkner’s scholarship has focused on constitutional and administrative law, race and public policy, and critical organization theory.

Faulkner is an award-winning teacher, inspiring students to exceed their own expectations for learning, intellectual development, and personal growth. She teaches courses in public administration, constitutional law, administrative law, research methods, and the politics of race, ethnicity, and gender. She has supervised more than 10 undergraduate research students in the areas of law and judicial policy.

Faulkner is active in the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and served for three years as editorial assistant for the journal Administration and Society. Her dissertation examined Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr.’s social justice jurisprudence, and she published “Cultural Critical Incidents in Hazardous Occupations: A Preliminary Exploration” (with Tonya Smith-Jackson, Enid Montague, and Chanel Thomas). She is a former research associate at Virginia Tech’s Race and Social Policy Research Center.

In 2014, Faulkner received a Teaching Excellence Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Four years later, she received the Diggs Teaching Scholar Award from Virginia Tech.

Dr. Ellington Graves serves as the Interim Senior Associate Vice Provost. He handles most of the responsibilities for the day-to-day supervision of the Office for Inclusion and Diversity at Virginia Tech. Dr. Graves supports the leadership team across all divisions of OID and meets with university leadership in consultation on strategic goals and priorities. This comes after spending the last three years working with OID’s student-facing programs and continuing to take point on initiatives related to diversity in the academic mission. Dr. Graves previous served as the Director of the Africana Studies program and has worked at Virginia Tech since 2004.

Eric Lyon is a research composer focused on articulated noise, computer chamber music, and spatial orchestration. His book on designing audio objects is published by A-R Editions. He is a guest editor for a Computer Music Journal issue on computer music for high-density loudspeaker arrays. He has worked in Asia, the United Kingdom, and the US, where he is currently employed by Virginia Tech. More specifically, he is a professor at the School of Performing Arts, and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, & Technology (ICAT).

Dr. Edward Polanco was born in Los Angeles, CA, and his ancestors are from Kuskatan (Nahua territories in what is now Western and Central El Salvador). His parents fled their homeland due to political violence and instability in Central America. Dr. Polanco is an assistant professor in the Department of History with a deep love and appreciation for Hip Hop music and its role as a tool for social critique and change by Black, and other minoritized, artists. He has been influenced by 2pac, NWA, Tego Calderon, Shock G, Kid Frost, Mecate, Method Man, Eddie Dee, Ivy Queen, MF Doom, Delinquent Habits, and countless other Rap/Hip Hop artists. He is especially interested in Indigenous and Black liberation, empowerment, and decolonization via Hip Hop music.

Dr. Tyechia Thompson, a Howard University alum, is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Virginia Tech. She is a scholar of 20th and 21st Century American Literature with expertise in African American writers in Paris, Africana studies, James Baldwin, and digital humanities. She recently published an “Afrofuturist Intellectual Mixtapes: A Classroom Case Study” in Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Dr. Wright is an experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer, a Black Biracial cisgender Queer woman from Appalachia. Wright is a scholar-activist, working for linguistic justice outside the academy and interdisciplinarity inside the academy. Her research includes analyzing perceptions of Black professionalism through metalinguistic interviews and sociophonetic experimentation; a machine learning study of lexical racialization in sports journalism; an audit study of linguistic profiling in the housing market; and a meta-analysis of language planning policy in Ghana. Wright is also a coloratura soprano.