Laina Dawes is a freelance writer and music journalist from Toronto. You can check out her online portfolio and blog at: www.lainad.com.

Moya Bailey is a senior Comparative Women’s Studies Major at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Jean Chen is the managing editor of PopandPolitics.com. She likes New York because of the thin crust pizza. She hates New York because of the humidity and the lack of free WiFi.

Dan Tres OMi is a contributing writer to VEBALISMS Magazine. You can reach him at dantresomi@msn.com or visit his site at: selfra.blogspot.com.

Hailing from NY but dislocated in a seemingly never-ending search for knowledge, Shawan is a grad student who is tired of reading bad scholarship on hip-hop.

With pipe dreams of saving the world, she’ll settle for making you think. It’s hip-hop that keeps her connected. Whether good or bad it never ceases to amaze Shawan. She falls in and out of love with hip-hop everyday depending on which channel she’s watching.

Alfie Ebojo dislikes bios because she considers herself a work in progress. She is an artist, a graphic designer, an illustrator, a poet, a performance artist, a producer, a community builder, the female element of Poorhouse Projekts, an active souljah in Balagtasan Collective, one half of Crazy Smitten! Productions, servant to the people, village to the children, student of life and daughter of God.

Poorhouse Projekts

Raquel has been known as a renaissance b-girl. Coming of age during the time when hip-hop was beginning to grace our streets, she has seen its transformation through many generations.

VERBALISMS magazine grew out of her annoyance with the lack of coverage on women in the culture. Picking up magazine after magazine and seeing one or two paragraphs (or sometimes none) covering the female presence in hip-hop, encouraged her to take action: and VERBALISMS, the womb of hip-hop was birthed.

Disgustingly obsessed with KyotoMassive; Sound Clash that’ll make you go bump in the night and hurt your feet from dancing. Enjoys paper cuts because they encourage more typing and the usage of glow-in-the-dark Ninja Turtle bandaids. Video game fanatic who’s obsessed with only the ‘secrets’.
Still bumps MF DOOM’s ‘Voices’ joints; both pt 0 & 1 every night when she can’t sleep.

Natalie Parales has been a hip-hop head from the get go. Back when she was in the 1st grade, her mommy bought her the “Fresh Rap” compilation tape. Ever since, she has been recording instrumentals from late night radio hip-hop shows and rhyming with her Fisher Price mic.

Then back in 1997 when rhyming starting becoming competitive, she was “battling” in the school lunchrooms. The only downside to that was that most emcees in the area happened to be males. That is when she began the search for a dope female emcee.

Times have changed and instead of looking for competitors, she researches and writes about them. She also enjoys red toothbrushes, vinyl crunching and vegan burgers.

Iman Saadiqa Abdul-Majid (a.k.a. Tori Baker) was born and raised in Detroit, MI. She became a fan of hip-hop early on listening to her aunts RunDMC, Beastie Boys and Ice-T vinyl. As she got older she got deeper into womens hip-hop, but as gangsta rap took hold and “good” hip-hop became lost in the undertow of commercial rap, she moved away from hip-hop preferring old school, soul, R&B and alternative rock – often returning to some hip-hop like WuTang, Ill Al Scratch and Boogie Monsters.

When she went to college, she re-discovered hip-hop through a campus crew called the BMC (Black Milk Conglomerate), then later found out about Binary Star, Subterraneous Crew, Athletic Mic League, and Funktelligence – local Michigan crews. Slowly but surely she re-immersed herself in hip-hop, on a never ending quest to find GOOD hip-hop.