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 with indigenous Gond roots from the Deccan 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. While at Honeywell Inc, in his directorial role there, he established a culture of customer discovery and coached designers, product managers and executives on 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 and is currently exploring his indigenous Gond heritage via artistic traditions. With almost two decades spent at the intersection of visual design, enterprise, and human-centered innovation, Niteesh is currently interested in how deep listening can become a super power available to all of us to help create connection and possibilities that benefit organizations as well as individuals alike. 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 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 Ramjas
Rona was born and raised on the Essequibo Coast of Guyana, a country with a complicated colonial past. Cited by The Center for Strategic and International Studies: “As in many other countries in the region, a long period of colonization and slavery left behind ethnocultural divides that have persisted to this day.” A descendant of South Asian Indentured Servants, Rona was for the most part, raised by her Hindu aunt who practiced Arya Samaj, a movement from India that rejected the idea of caste. Rona was dedicated to her worship, went to temple every Sunday, and did her pujas and rituals. However, her aunt, a strict Arya Samaj disciple, was thankfully relaxed about other religions, and also encouraged Rona to attend Catholic Church with her maternal grandfather who had converted due to British Colonization.
Rona was free to attend religious events with her muslim cousins and occasionally went to the Baptist Church with her neighbors. She eventually developed admiration for the drumming trance practices of folklore traditions with African roots that were pushed underground by British colonials. She was enamored by her brother’s Rastafarians friends, and felt a resonance with the half naked indigenous villagers in the rivers where she spent all of her summers away from her aunt and her religious routines. Growing up in a small coastal village, no one was a stranger to villagers who worshiped Kali or did Obeah and Voodoo or other spiritual practices that were considered “dark” but all of the above engrained in Rona, respect for differences and a cautiousness for spirituality in general.