Presenters + Panelists

David Butler is an artist, film designer, and President of the Buffalo Niagara Proud Alliance. As an administrator of Buffalo’s main LGBTQ+ Facebook page he realized the sense of community that he grew up with was gone. Young people were coming out with no sense of connection and were vulnerable to predators, drugs and other bad decisions. Inspired by two overdose deaths, he decided to take on the role of an LGBTQ+ community organizer. He created Pride Inside on social media in 2020 as a first step to reimagining “Pride” based around history, outreach and celebration. This gradually led to the creation of the Buffalo Niagara Proud Alliance in 2022, a group of leaders and organizers representing 12 Grassroots LGBTQ+ organizations. We have published three issues of our on-line magazine Proud Voice, organized events around Pride, Coming Out Day and gathered nearly 400 people to gather around the tragic death of Sam Nordquist. The fledgling BNPA obtained its 501c3 status in March of this year and we are excited about our future.

Alberto O. Cappas is a publisher, poet, author, and community journalist whose work centers on Latino cultural identity and the importance of communities controlling their own narratives. As publisher of Buffalo Latino Village and East Harlem Journal, he has spent decades documenting Latino life, advocating for independent media, and challenging institutions that overlook community voices. His books, Back to the Twilight Zone and The Educational Pledge, examine political gatekeeping in Latino communities and promote education, reflection, and self-development.

Cappas is also developing LOWEISA, a cultural identity framework for Buffalo’s Lower West Side designed to strengthen pride, collaboration, and recognition of the neighborhood’s African, Taíno, Puerto Rican, Latino, and multicultural roots. He is the only surviving poet from the NFTA Latino Poetic Art Mural, now stored despite commitments for its return.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City, Cappas graduated from UB in 1973 and helped establish several Latino student and community organizations.

Grace Cole is the Managing Editor at The Record at Buffalo State University where she is a senior Journalism and Business Administration major. Her writing focuses on profiles and current events affecting campus and the city at large. She is a Western New York native and has been a passionate student journalist since high school!

Katie Dusza is a junior at Canisius University and acts as the Managing Editor for The Canisius Griffin. She is an English and Communications double major. Katie has written for
The Griffin since her freshman year and became the Assistant News Editor her sophomore year, becoming the News Editor the second semester of that year.

Chris Fritton is a poet, printer, and fine artist, who has over two decades of experience writing, printing, and making his own books, in addition to collaborative efforts with other authors and artists. He is the former Studio Director of the Western New York Book Arts Center in Buffalo, NY. He co-founded the highly-acclaimed Buffalo Small Press Book Fair with Kevin Thurston in 2007, and organized the fair solo from 2009-2016. In 2014, Fritton embarked on a long-term project called The Itinerant Printer, where he visited over 200 letterpress print shops throughout North America in ten years, covering over 150,000 miles and making over 50,000 prints on the road. He is currently the editor of the regional anonymous art newspaper, Lake Rats Dispatch.

Heather Gring joined the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library as Rare Book Curator in January of 2024. Previously, she spent over a decade as Archivist at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. As a cultural heritage professional, her practice is rooted in the importance of community connections to sustain meaningful cultural documentation. The Buffalo & Erie County Public Library is one of only 25 public library systems in the country with a Rare Books department in the public trust. Much of Gring’s work at the Library has focused on how to make the Rare Book collection more equitable and connected to the public. Developing a Zine collection has been a key component of expanding awareness of this
incredible shared civic resource.

Bio forthcoming

Veronica L. Horowitz’s research examines the American
criminal punishment system, with particular attention to issues of gender, mercy, and inequality. Her current work focuses on monetary sanctions, child support debt, the lived experience of incarceration, and the adaptation of Scandinavian prison reforms within the United States. More recently, her research has turned to the social and emotional dimensions of life behind bars, with a particular focus on acts of kindness among incarcerated men and the significance of food and hunger in the carceral context. She also teaches in the UB College in Prison Program at Wende Correctional Facility.

Carrie T. Isard (Ph.D., Temple University, 2014) is a critical/cultural scholar of media and popular culture representation, news framing, and public memory. She is also a historian of twentieth century Black Press journalism. She is author of Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) and
co-editor of the multiauthor volume, Popular Culture & Public Memory: Media Representation, Nostalgia, and Politics of the Past (Routledge, forthcoming). She is also the co-curator of the The Adolescentia Project digital archive and contributed to The Adolescentia Project: Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity (Palgrave, 2024).

I’Jaz Ja’ciel is an award-winning investigative and multimedia reporter at BTPM News and a Buffalo, New York, native. Her reporting focuses on government accountability, public policy and data-driven investigations, particularly how institutional decisions affect local communities.

Ja’ciel began her journalism career at WBFO in 2019 and later reported for Spectrum News 1 Buffalo and Investigative Post before returning to Buffalo Toronto Public Media in 2026. She also served for three years as president of the Buffalo chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Her honors include a regional Edward R. Murrow Award, a Changemakers 30 Under 30 Award and Buffalo’s InfoTech BETAs Rising Star Award. A 2024 NICAR fellow and
2026 Center for Health Journalism fellow, Ja’ciel holds degrees in journalism and data science and analytics from Buffalo State University, where she was named graduate
valedictorian.

Mylien Lai is the editor-in-chief of The Spectrum, University at Buffalo’s student newspaper. She has previously served as the senior editor of the arts and news desks. Lai also reported for The Buffalo News, recently shining light on the experiences of caregivers and the loved ones they support in Western New York under the New York & Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative. She can be found drinking triple-shot espressos at a cafe, but the quickest way to reach her is to email, mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com

Andrew is a senior at Canisius University. He is the Editor-In-Chief for the school newspaper, The Griffin, and mainly writes for the sports section. He has covered championship games to senior days on staff for multiple sports. I am a huge sports fanatic and love the outdoors!

Selena Pham is the communications director of M.U.V. Magazine. M.U.V Magazine is a community-centered publication rooted in Buffalo, New York. created to amplify the stories, artistry, and lived experiences of people from underrepresented backgrounds. Through visual art and storytelling, M.U.V seeks to foster connection, inspire creativity, and strengthen a sense of belonging within our city.

Marcus Ramos is a senior at Buffalo State University, majoring in English and minoring in Writing and Philosophy. He is the current President of The Record, Buffalo State’s student-run newspaper. His articles focus on local Buffalo events and analyzing pop culture impacts on society. He has also written articles for the Queens Ledger in New York City, highlighting local events in the borough of Queens.
Once completing his undergraduate degree, he plans to pursue graduate school with the long-term goal of
becoming a professor in English.

Jennifer Ryan-Bryant holds a B.A in English and Music from the University of Rochester and an M. A. and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. In 2005, she joined the faculty at Buffalo State University, where she is now Professor of English. At Buffalo State, she teaches courses in American poetry and fiction, ethnic literatures, Africana Studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, African American Review, Callaloo, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Radical Teacher, among other publications. Her books include Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Turning the Table: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them (Lexington Books, 2022), and The Human in This Place: American Literatures of Lynching (University of Massachusetts Press, 2027).

Dr. Julie Setele (they/them) is a User Experience and Outreach Librarian at SUNY Buffalo State University. With a background in sociology, gender studies, and criminology, Julie prioritizes social justice, information access, and privacy in their librarianship work. At Buffalo State’s E. H. Butler
Library, Julie runs the Social Justice Book Club, teaches credit-bearing information literacy courses, and curates a collection of zines (DIY, self-published magazines). In their free time, they enjoy making zines, which they distribute online, as well as at local zine fests. “My Abortion
Journey” was recently re-published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. “AI Is Very Bad, Actually:
A Manifesto” has been downloaded almost 3,500 times.

Bio forthcoming

Adam Smith-Perez is the urban affairs reporter at the nonprofit outlet Investigative Post, where he covers housing, public health and criminal justice issues. He is a Report for America corps member, and a 2022 graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he received Honors recognition in Reporting. In 2025, Adam received a grant to report on New York’s opioid settlement funds from Reporting on Addiction, a collaboration between the nonprofit outlet 100 Days in Appalachia and the Opioid Policy Institute.

His work has appeared in VICE, The Nation, Aperture, and other outlets. Adam has also worked extensively as a freelance fact-checker for several outlets, including Mother Jones, Ambrook Research, Noema Magazine, and HarperCollins. He started his journalism career reporting on COVID’s impact on immigrant communities in his hometown of Boston, where he worked for an immigrant and refugee advocacy non-profit writing newsletters.

Dersu Ekim Tanca earned his Ph.D. from the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. His recent research has been published in journals including Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Turkish Studies, The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, and Human Rights Quarterly. His research interests include authoritarianism, democratization, right-wing populism, Turkish politics, European Union (EU)
politics, and Turkey–EU relations.

Jay Wendland is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the History and Political Science Department at Daemen University. His research interests center on American political behavior with a keen eye on elections, voting, and electoral reform in the United States. His publications include the books, The Constant Two Plan: Reforming the Electoral College to Account for the National Popular Vote and Campaigns That Matter: The Importance of Campaign Visits in Presidential Nominating Contests. He has two forthcoming books focused on Ranked Choice Voting, Representation, and Democracy. His research has also appeared in peer reviewed journals like Electoral Studies, Social Science Quarterly, and The Forum. Jay regularly teaches courses on media and politics, public opinion, and popular culture in an effort to help students today make sense of our political system.

Juan Carlos Zaldivar is a filmmaker, media artist, and professor whose work explores memory, identity, migration, and the ways we tell stories about one another. His films and immersive projects have been presented at Sundance, SXSW, and other festivals and cultural institutions internationally. His documentary 90 Miles, a personal exploration of the Cuban-American experience, was broadcast nationally on PBS’s POV. His more recent work focuses on dementia, caregiving, and the possibilities that emerge when we reconsider our assumptions about memory and personhood. He is currently producing Remembering to Forget, a feature documentary rooted in his experience caring for his mother, and The Gold Room, a participatory portrait and augmented-reality project created with care partners of people living with memory challenges.

Yini Zhang studies social media and AI, focusing on how we
make sense of these technologies, how they shape the information environments we inhabit, and their broader societal consequences. She is a faculty affiliate of UB’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science and Center for Information Integrity. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, and she has been consulted as an expert by major media outlets including The New York Times, NPR, USA TODAY, and BBC.

Kaden Zhong is a born-and-raised New Yorker who was swept away to the icy city of Buffalo, eventually finding a place at UB’s The Spectrum. English was always his favorite subject in school, so naturally he gravitated toward the humanities. Chasing a career in the humanities has been a tough but rewarding process. The professionals, mentors, and friends he’s met along the way are what make him who he is, and he wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Though his interests and hobbies are nomadic and sometimes fleeting, the one thing that always remains true is that he would probably rather be hanging out with his dog instead.

Adam Zyglis is the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Buffalo News, his hometown paper. Zyglis began drawing editorial cartoons for The Griffin at Canisius College in 2000, where he graduated summa cum laude from the All-College Honors Program.

At just 22 years old, Zyglis became the staff cartoonist for The News in August of 2004, replacing Tom Toles who left for The Washington Post to succeed the legendary Herblock. Since then, his cartoons have become syndicated through Cagle Cartoons and have appeared in publications around the world, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and MAD magazine. Zyglis has been awarded over a dozen national awards, including 6 National Headliner Awards, the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Cartoon, and the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

Zyglis has served as President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and has twice served as a Juror for the Pulitzer.