David Acosta is a queer, indigenous, mixed-race poet, writer, curator, and activist. He founded and served as the first executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative (GALAEI). He was also a co-founder of the Philadelphia Working Fund for Artists with HIV/AIDS and served on the boards of The AIDS Law Project, The Philadelphia AIDS Walk, and others. David was a founding member of Our Living Legacy (1988), the nation’s first festival devoted to art and AIDS. In 1989 he curated the Pieces of Life Project at Taller Puertorriqueño which brought the Names Project (AIDS Quilt) to Philadelphia. In December of 2011 he curated Witness: Artists Reflect on Thirty Years of the AIDS Pandemic. His writings have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. David is a founding member of the international artist collective Dissident Bodies and the Philadelphia-based artist collective Dislocada/Dislocated. He is co-founder and Artistic Director for Casa de Duende in Philadelphia.

John Anderies is the Director of the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—one of the country’s largest LGBT archives. He is also the manager of the Philadelphia AIDS Oral History Project. He has also worked as an archivist at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, and as Head of Special Collections at Haverford College. John has received and served as Principal Investigator on numerous grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Council on Library and Information Resources, Daniel W. Dietrich II Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Park Services, Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, Pennsylvania Library Services and Technology Act, and The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. He is a board member of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), and is a founding organizer of the Pennsylvania LGBT History Network. John holds degrees from Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music (BM), Case Western Reserve University (MA), and Indiana University (MLS). Born and raised in Western Colorado and educated in the Midwest, John is proud to have called Philadelphia home for over 20 years.

Dr. Lee Arnold was the Library Director from 1992 and later additionally the Chief Operating Officer of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Since 2022 he is now Librarian Emeritus. While working on his library degree in Milwaukee in the 1980s, Lee was a volunteer at an LGBT crisis line. After relocating to Philadelphia, be began volunteering at the AIDS Library of Philadelphia, eventually helping to facilitate their Food For Thought outreach lecture series. Later he was named to the board of the AIDS Information Network and was there when AIN merged with Philadelphia FIGHT. In between, he participated in the Day Without Art marches through the city every December 1st—with everyone marching in silence carrying black umbrellas memorializing the toll AIDS had taken on the artistic communities. He also participated in a few annual AIDS Walks—in truth he never actually walked, and his cat Pepper was his only “sponsor,” but it was his small way of contributing. Lee is a historian and writer and was a regular reviewer of AIDS publications for Library Journal. He was a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is a member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides. He participates in LGBT history endeavours in both Philadelphia and Harrisburg (including the Philadelphia AIDS Oral History Project).

Chris Bartlett is an American gay activist, feminist, educator, and researcher who lives in Philadelphia, PA, and is the Executive Director of the William Way Community Center. He was director of the SafeGuards Gay Men’s Health Project in Philadelphia from 1991–2001, where he developed innovative programs addressing the broader health needs of gay and bisexual men beyond HIV and AIDS. In 2003, Bartlett joined forces with gay activist Eric Rofes to create the Gay Men’s Health Leadership Academy, a national center for excellence for leadership development of gay and bisexual men and their allies based at the White Crane Institute. In 2005, he directed the LGBT Community Assessment, an assessment of the broad health related needs of LGBT populations in the Philadelphia region. The City of Philadelphia and Philadelphia Foundation subsequently funded an LGBT Youth Assessment, which he also directed. He has created an on-line Wiki to document the deaths of gay men from AIDS between 1981 and the present. The site acts as an on-line AIDS quilt, on which community members and families can document the lives of their friends and loved ones. His work has shown a continuing interest in participatory democracy, starting with his early participation in ACT UP Philadelphia. During his tenure at the William Way LGBT Community Center, he has focused on community building through arts and culture, empowerment, and community connections.

Caroline Castleman is a second-year medical student at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. She studied the history of science at Princeton University and was connected with William Way and the PAOHP during her senior thesis research, which focused on the development of AIDS origin theories during the 1980s and 1990s. In medical school, she continues to be engaged in history and LGBTQ+ advocacy, serving as co-president of the History of Medicine and Surgery Society and education & research chair of Pride in Medicine. She hopes to be involved in more projects like the PAOHP throughout her career to increase engagement with medical history, particularly among physicians.

Alexi Chacon is a culture critic, social policy researcher and oral history zealot. He currently works at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) as a Performance and Data Analyst in their Office of Civil Rights. He was an inaugural member of the BIPOC Critics Lab where he wrote for The Public, New York Theatre Workshop and Woolly Mammoth Theatre. His writing has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Body, Theatrely, The Brooklyn Rail and more. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation from the University of Oxford.

John Cunningham is a founder and past board member of the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund (DVLF), a community-based donor-advised fund for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities at The Philadelphia Foundation. He has served as Co-Chair of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center Board and was among the founders of the AIDS Library of Philadelphia, now part of Philadelphia FIGHT, and From All Walks of Life, now The AIDS Fund. In 2004, he served as Co-Grand Marshall, with Kay Lahusen, of Philadelphia’s Gay Pride Parade. John worked at The Free Library of Philadelphia for over 30 years, retiring from the position of Chief of Branch and Regional Libraries in 2003. His early library activism included participating during the 1970s in the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force where he helped pioneer the examination of lesbian and gay themes in adolescent literature. In 1979, John co-authored, with Frances Hanckel, A Way of Love, A Way of Life: A Young Person’s Introduction to What It Means to be Gay. The book was named to the prestigious Best Books for Young Adults list for that year.

Alyson Esther del Pino (they/she) is an artist from Miami, FL, with a background in bibliography, literature, and editorial work. They hold a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Material Texts and Digital Humanities from the University of Pennsylvania. Alyson Esther’s interests include ephemera, zines, artists’ books, printmaking, and queer history.

Kelly is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College and an adjunct instructor of media studies at City College New York. She has a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a Master’s in International Affairs from Penn State. She is passionate about social justice storytelling and the intersection of pop culture and politics.

Sid Feinberg is a geography MA student at the University of Kentucky interested in late 20th century queer social movement archives and historical underpinnings of contemporary medical and technical mediations of queer and trans life. His research focuses on grassroots AIDS information networks in the early Philadelphia AIDS crisis and the new kinds of care geographies traced from the nodes of existing service provision. He currently lives in Philadelphia and is particularly committed to understanding specific local histories of queer and trans life in the city.

Diana Myers is an archivist from Philadelphia. After receiving degrees in medieval studies from Harvard and Oxford, she shifted gears to pursue a career in rare books and archives and recently earned a master’s degree in library science at Simmons University, having worked at a number of special collections institutions in the Greater Philadelphia and Boston areas along the way. Her academic research projects tend to coalesce around medieval religious history, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of the book, with a side interest in the politics of archival classification and use.

Megan K. Reed, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Connected Care, the Department of Emergency Medicine, and the College of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University. Her research is focused on mitigating the risks associated with drug use by conducting research responsive to the unregulated and dynamic drug market. Dr. Reed specializes in qualitative methods and coalitions with community, academic, and governmental stakeholders. Her harm reduction research has been funded by the NIH and others.

Ally Richman (she/her) is an experienced social science researcher and nonprofit administrator who believes that organizations have an ethical imperative to use data to guide social justice work. Since moving to Philadelphia in 2005, she has traveled between academic and community spaces working to connect theory with practice in nonprofit leadership, program development, and data-driven decision making. Working at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and structural inequality, Ally earned her PhD in Sociology at Temple University in 2013, and joined the AIDS Library team at Philadelphia FIGHT in 2015. Ally then had the opportunity to support the William Way LGBT Community Center as their Chief Operating Officer, and she is currently the Chief Administrative and Financial Officer at VisionLink. She brings over 15 years of experience merging critical analysis with hands-on work rooted within communities.

Nat Rivkin is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Their research interests include pre-modern poetry, trans studies, and the history of sexuality. They are working on a dissertation that examines gender, race, and classical reception history in late medieval and early modern England. For the 2022–24 academic year, Nat is a Graduate Associate for the Trans Oral History Project run by the University’s Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies. Nat received a B.A. in English and Gender & Women’s Studies from Pomona College.

Ali Roseberry-Polier’s background is in community organizing and activist storytelling, connecting present-day movements to legacies of resistance. They graduated from Swarthmore College in 2014 with a B.A. in History and Gender & Sexuality Studies, and from Rutgers University-Newark in 2020 with an M.A. in American Studies, with a focus on Public Humanities. In addition to PAOHP, other archival and storytelling projects they’ve worked on include as the research assistant on the Black Liberation 1969 archive (Swarthmore College) and as the producer for the Craft of Campaigns podcast (Training for Change). Ali’s writing has appeared in Waging Nonviolence and Hidden City Philadelphia, among others.

Davíd Satten-López (he/him/his) is an ALA Spectrum Scholar and a recent graduate from the master’s in information sciences program at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His research interests revolve around storytelling and how stories form identities and form places. His professional interests focus on platforming marginalized histories and attending to the material barriers that inhibit communities from accessing their own legacies in archival collections. Davíd’s home is in Tucson, Arizona.

Tyrone Smith was the founder of Unity, Inc., an early African-American HIV/AIDS education and services agency in Philadelphia which included Unity Housing in West Philadelphia. He also served on the boards of We the People and the William J. Craig Foundation. Smith is currently a community advisor to the Penn Medicine’s Center for AIDS Research and is also the current Board President of The Colours Organization, Inc., whose mission focuses on enriching the lives of LGBT communities of color by providing wellness services and holding events to unite and strengthen the community.

Heshie Zinman has a long history of activism on both the local and national level. He has experience creating impactful nonprofits, growing non-profit boards, and fundraising. He has a passionate commitment to the health and well-being of LGBT and HIV communities and helped shape the city’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the period of 1987-1998. Heshie was a driving force behind the start- up of ActionAIDS, AIDS Fund, SafeGuards Gay Men’s Health Project, and Delaware Valley Legacy Fund. He founded the AIDS Library Philadelphia (which today resides at Philadelphia FIGHT) and went on to become the Executive Director of the AIDS Information Network. Heshie has worked as HIV Community Relations Manager for DuPont Pharmaceuticals Company and Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals.