Team

Niteesh Elias (Design)

“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 a Catholic mother from the coastal Portuguese state of Goa and a Protestant father with Indigenous Gond roots from the Deccan heartland of Madhya Pradesh. He grew up Catholic—a religion that comprises only about 1.5 percent of India’s population—in bustling Mumbai, where Catholics were a minority even within his missionary-run Catholic high school.

Growing up in Mumbai, Niteesh spoke English at home and Marathi and Bambaiya Hindi with friends and people in his community. He celebrated Christmas, Diwali, Holi, and Eid. Summers were spent playing cricket in the maidans (open fields)—the one “religion” that has long unified India, even in its current divisive era. Still, Niteesh remembers walking home from a game with a school friend who said, “I’d invite you over if you were from my religion/caste.”

These early experiences shaped Niteesh’s lifelong attention to difference, belonging, and the quiet ways people listen—or fail to listen—to one another. Trained in computer science, he followed his curiosity toward human-centered design and listening as a practice. He has conducted ethnographic studies in rural Indian villages and American manufacturing plants, and designed business models and products across healthcare, safety, energy efficiency, and other sectors. During his time at Honeywell Inc., where he held a directorial role, he helped establish a culture of customer discovery and coached designers, product managers, and executives on how bias interferes with understanding—and how empathetic listening can deepen connection with both customers and colleagues.

A listening artist, Niteesh works with listening as both material and tool. Through visual art, participatory experiences, and facilitated spaces for shared attention, he invites people to pause, reflect, and connect, informed by his Indigenous Gond heritage and its oral storytelling traditions. Spanning nearly two decades across visual design, enterprise, and human-centered innovation, his practice has come to center listening as a creative and civic act—one that makes room for belonging.

Through Freedom Tunnel Press, Niteesh is committed to amplifying a diversity of voices and creating space for writers and artivists to explore identity—or resist defining it—on their own terms, in ways that feel true to the stories they want to tell.

Brooke Shaffner (Editor)

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 (Split/Lip Press, 2024) is a book that straddles borders, bringing together drag queens, nuns, activists, artists, and healers.

Country of Under won a Next Generation Indie Book Award Grand Prize, the Foreword Indies Silver Award for Literary Fiction, and the 1729 Book Prize, and was runner-up for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Brooke’s work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Scoundrel Time, Necessary Fiction, The Rumpus, Marie Claire, BOMB, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and Litmosphere. She has received grants from United States Artists, the Arts & Science Council, and the City of Charlotte, and residencies at MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, among others.

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 illnesses primary sclerosing cholangitis and Crohn’s disease, and losing a love to cancer. An excerpt of her memoir-in-progress, Everything I Love Is Out to Sea, won the 2023 Lit/South Nonfiction Award, judged by Melissa Febos, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. She co-founded Freedom Tunnel Press and Listening Labs with her partner in life and art, Niteesh Elias, and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. Find more at her author site.

Rona Ramjas (Managing Story Editor)

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 Rastafarian 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.

Rona recently founded The Late Edition, a volunteer-led newsroom and living archive dedicated to honoring lives that might otherwise go unrecorded — the unhoused, the forgotten, and the uncounted. Through this work, she seeks to create a quiet place of remembrance where every life is treated as worthy of witness.

Ita (Sunandita) Mehrotra (Editor at Large – The Understory)

Ita (Sunandita) Mehrotra is a visual artist, researcher and educator based out of New Delhi. Ita creates graphic narratives, non-fiction comics, illustrated text, and animation, often stemming from her ongoing engagements within people’s movements, and with a focus on citizenship, feminist leadership and memory keeping. Her work has been published and exhibited by thewire.in, Westland Books, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Tarq Mumbai, Fummetto Festival Luzern, popula.org, Zubaan Books, Goethe Institute, Yoda Press, AdAstra Comix, among others.

Ita has led community based arts programmes with children, young people and women for over a decade, and has run long-term programmes with The Community Libraries Project (Khirkee Village, New Delhi), Aagaaz Theater Trust (Nizzamudin Basti), Loka School (Bihar), among others. She led and directed the non-profit organisation Artreach India between 2017–2024. Ita works with community practices of visual storytelling, using materials and experiences from around the site, sensorial map-making, self-publishing and community exhibition making as bringing entire neighbourhoods and villages together for dialogue through her artistic practices.

Ita studied at Mirambika Free Progress school, a pioneering experimental learning space that greatly encouraged holistic development, learning through the arts and self learning. She has a Bachelors Degree in Philosophy (Hons.) from St. Stephens’ College, Delhi University (2010), from where she was awarded an exchange year at SciencesPo Paris (2011). At SciencesPo, Ita earned a Diploma in French Art History and Culture Studies. She returned to India to pursue a Masters at the School of Culture, Ambedkar University Delhi (2014). Ita’s MPhil from Arts and Aesthetics School, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2017) focuses on feminist graphic narratives in contemporary India.

Evelyn Dyer (Editorial Intern)

Evelyn hopes to embody a goose in her work.

Across the Research Triangle Park, where she grew up, and UNC Charlotte, where she lives now, Evelyn watched geese migrate, care for each other in ways humans struggle to, dwell in public spaces humans are not always allowed to, and resist the systems that prevent their innate lifestyles.

Evelyn hopes to embody a goose by caring for community members’ health and wellbeing. Her passions lie primarily in transparent and empathetic human relations, early childhood literacy, menstrual topics, and food security. She writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and occasionally poetry. As part of her Bachelor of Arts in Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies, Evelyn researched adolescent menstrual literacy, identifying a literacy ecology and ideological frameworks of education genres. She also researched alongside a team of UNC Charlotte students and stakeholders at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library, proposing creative, applicable, and evidence-based recommendations to optimize volunteer practices across the library’s twenty branches; she hopes to continue this research with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library.

Evelyn hopes to care for her community members by working as a public librarian, continuing her education with a master’s and doctorate degree in library and information science. In her service as a librarian, she aims to initiate early childhood literacy programs, menstrual literacy programs, food security programs, and access services in her community, allowing others to dwell where they please and live closer to their fullest potential. She also hopes to work as an independent researcher, furthering understanding and practice in the fields she holds passion for, and hopes to eventually earn a master’s of fine arts in creative writing and bachelor’s degree in biology or physics, as time permits.

Ezra Minard (Editorial Intern)

Ezra Minard is a rising Junior at Davidson College, where he studies English. A creative writer from Appalachian Ohio, he serves as the Arts and Opinions Editor for the student literary magazine Libertas and is a fellow of the Davidson College Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, which promotes constructive dialogue across campus and beyond. In 2025, Ezra participated in the Davidson College Summer Arts Residency, where he wrote short stories exploring familial, economic, and gender anxieties and dynamics in modern Appalachia. He is drawn to contemporary fiction, literary criticism, and experimental artistic practices. Following graduation, he is interested in pursuing law, public service, and the arts.