If, Then’s Community Advisory Board
With our community advisory board, we aim to articulate and invite in the specific curiosities, creative priorities, and types of expertise the members of our community want to see in our programming and organizational values. Short introductions to each of our board members are below!
Jess Skyleson (they/them)
Chair
Jess Skyleson holds an MFA in Digital + Media from Rhode Island School of Design and a MS in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Their work encompasses narrative medicine, computational and sound poetry, and collaborative art. Winner of the 2022 Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Prize, the 2025 Data Sonification Awards, and an Excellence Award in Gallery Nat's London Contemporary Art Review, their work has appeared in anthologies and exhibits throughout the US and UK.
kathy wu (she/they)
kathy wu ✩彡 is an artist, poet, designer, and educator working across language, computation, books, fiber. They currently teach at RISD Graphic Design. Her debut book, She Will Last as Long as Stones is out with Wendy's Subway. They are enthusiastic about collective publishing, political education, and organizing against displacement.
Mark Sample (he/him)
Mark is a literary scholar whose study of recent American fiction led him to the digital world, where contemporary artists and writers are on the vanguard of experimental literature. His teaching and research has evolved to include software studies, video games, and other forms of algorithmic culture.
Nkosi Nkululeko (he/him)
Nkosi’s work is published in Chess Life Online, Ploughshares, Poem-A-Day, Poet Lore, The Offing, Oxford Poetry, and his square poems in ANMLY, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Nation. He’s anthologized in Bettering American Vol. 3 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Nkosi is a chess, music, and poetry teacher from Harlem!
Sacharja (suh-car-juh) (he/they)
Sacharja is a cultural worker exploring Blackness, queerness, memory, grief, homespace, and liberation struggle through scholarship, multimedia poetry, educational practice, and community organizing. They’re currently based on Lenapehoking (Philly), where they focus on lifelong learning with adults outside the formal education system. Follow their work here.
Zach Whalen (he/him)
Zach Whalen is an Associate Professor at the University of Mary Washington where he teaches in Digital Studies. Recently, that has included courses in creative coding, game studies, graphic novels, and electronic literature. He is the co-editor (with Chris Foss and Jonathan W. Gray) of <cite>Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives</cite> and (with Laurie N. Taylor) of <cite>Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games</cite>. As a practitioner of computational writing, Whalen has published tiny digital poems in <cite>Taper</cite>, several popular artistic and literary Twitter bots (all of which are currently defunct), and the graphic novel <cite>An Arthrogram</cite>. He is currently working on a scholarly monograph about computer-generated books.