Niteesh Elias
Where are you from and what’s your last name? In India, your response reveals your religion and caste. Niteesh’s answer was complicated.
His experience of mixedness began at home with his Catholic mother from the coastal Portuguese state of Goa and his Protestant father from the Hindi heartland of Madhya Pradhesh. He grew up Catholic, a religion that comprises only 1.5 percent of India’s population, in bustling Mumbai. Catholics were the minority even in his missionary-run Catholic high school.
Growing up in Mumbai, he spoke English at home and Marathi and Bambiya Hindi with friends and people in his community. He celebrated Christmas, Diwali, Holi, and Eid. He and his friends spent summers playing cricket in the maidans (ball fields). Cricket is the one religion that unifies India, even in its current divisive era. Still, Niteesh remembers walking home from a cricket game with a school friend who said, “I’d invite you over if you were from my religion/caste.”
Niteesh enjoys seeking meaning and cultivating creativity at the intersection of diverse cultures and domains. Though trained in computer science, he followed his passion for human-centered design. He’s conducted ethnographic studies in rural Indian villages and American manufacturing plants and designed business models and products for healthcare, safety, energy efficiency, and other markets. In his directorial role at Honeywell, he coaches managers about how biases get in our way and how empathetic listening can connect us more deeply to both customers and employees. A visual artist, he enjoys combining watercolor and digital design to create stunning book covers. With almost two decades spent at the intersection of visual design, enterprise, and human-centered innovation, Niteesh is currently interested in how innovative business models can help creativity to thrive in the artistic world. Through Freedom Tunnel Press, he hopes to help bring a diversity of stories to readers and give writers the freedom to explore their identity (or not) in ways that feel authentic to the stories that they want to tell.
Brooke Shaffner
Brooke grew up part Garza, part Shaffner on the Texas-Mexico border. Her Garza grandfather was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who harvested citrus fruit before putting himself through school to become a pharmacist. Her Shaffner grandfather was raised Mennonite and the first in his family to attend college. She grew up singing Christmas carols with her hilarious tias leading synchronized hand jives and cheering at drag pageants in her town’s only gay bar. Her novel Country of Under is a book that straddles borders, bringing together drag queens, nuns, activists, artists, and healers. Country of Under won The 1729 Book Prize in Prose, judged by Diane Zinna, and is forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in April 2024. The novel was also the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up and was shortlisted for Dzanc Books’ Prize for Fiction and Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize. An excerpt won the Asheville Writers’ Workshop Fiction Contest.
Brooke is currently working on a memoir that explores living and loving in the face of radical uncertainty through the experiences of her father becoming a quadriplegic when she was a child, living with the chronic illness primary sclerosing cholangitis, and losing a love to cancer. An excerpt won the 2023 Lit/South Award, judged by Melissa Febos, and appeared in Litmosphere. Other work has been published in The Hudson Review, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, The Lit Pub, Marie Claire, and BOMB. Brooke has been awarded artist grants from United States Artists and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the I-Park Foundation, and VCCA. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow, and won the Charles Lloyd Writing Award at Davidson College. Read more at BrookeShaffner.com.
Brooke is the Founder/Director of Between the Lines, which offers writing, editing, tutoring, and workshops. She’s worked with Rio Grande Valley students on admissions and scholarship essays for 13 years. These students’ stories keep her connected to the border. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. Her writing has been published in The Hudson Review, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, The Lit Pub, Marie Claire Magazine, and BOMB. She has been awarded artist grants from United States Artists and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the I-Park Foundation, and VCCA France. Brooke hopes that yours is the next book that she pauses to read aloud from to Niteesh.
Brooke and Niteesh recently moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they love reading poems to each other on Blue Ridge Mountain overlooks. Niteesh loves drawing, designing, and playing guitar and Brooke loves writing, reading, and running. They are words + pictures. They believe in mixedness and want to see more of it in literature. They are on the lookout for good people to bring on to Freedom Tunnel Press as it grows.
Rona Davis
Rona studied creative writing at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, but had an untraditional college experience of first attending a community college, then dropping out due to a lack of direction and resources. She is the first in her immediate family to make it past high school.
After graduating from Columbia, Rona briefly worked in an office cubicle, but soon returned to the place that had always welcomed her with open arms—the subculture of NYC’s restaurant industry. There she could work and write quietly. In 2010, she took a personal narrative workshop with Brooke. She has continued to write, and share her writing with Brooke, in the many years since.
In 2022, Rona attended a Writers-and-Artists Eco-Residency in Holbox, Mexico, whose mission was to cultivate ecological awareness in residents’ creative expressions. There, Rona researched Holbox’s ecological challenges with waste and drainage and wrote the essay “Rainboots for Water Birds” for the anthology of residents’ work, The Green Flash/El Rayo Verde (Quantum Prose Books). Quantum Prose Books described her essay as “a performative piece of ecological awareness on the structural challenges that Holbox is facing in connection to drainage and residue”.
Roe is in a state of becoming–discovering her voice in the fluidity of water. Another name may emerge as she is still on a quest for a deeper understanding of her traumatic but magical childhood on the coastal lowlands of Essequibo Coast, Guyana.