WHO WE BE

AMBER ATIYA, a supportive housing and women’s rights advocate, is a multidisciplinary poet from Brooklyn. Dig on her poems in the Soul Sister Revue Poetry Compilation, Boston Review, A Gathering of the Tribes, and elsewhere. Her visual and text-based art has been exhibited at the Knockdown Center, Bessie’s Brooklyn, and Pace University. A 2021 recipient of the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award for Painters and Poets, her chapbook, the fierce bums of doo-wop, was published in 2014 by Argos Books.

BEATRICE CHEN is a nonprofit practitioner based in NYC working at the intersection of arts and culture, education, community development, and public history, with a primary focus on Manhattan’s Chinatown. She believes in the transformative potential of the arts to amplify the realities faced by marginalized communities, navigate polarities, and effect social change. She feels very fortunate for the opportunity to cultivate community and creativity with her fellow Sari-Sari co-founders.

CAROLYN ANTONIO is a NY/NJ-based writer, non-profit worker, and activist. She has been in the publishing, arts and culture, and nonprofit fields for over two decades. She’s a proud member of a 20-year-old+ women’s writing group, was a founding committee member of FAM (Filipino American Museum), and is a member of Sari-Sari: Women of Color Arts Coup. Grounded in activism by her past involvement in groups such as Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Gabriela Network, BABAE, and Womankind, she collaborated with two other Filipina writers on the play, Export Quality: A Theatrical Exploration Based on True Stories of Mail-Order Brides from the Philippines (mounted in 2023). Carolyn has been committed to Filipino, broader Asian American, and BIPOC community organizing, along with a life-long focus on women’s, racial, economic, and social justice issues–raising awareness, cultivating and building resources, and creating collaboration. She believes in the power of words to inspire action and community to bring about change from the grassroots. She strives to be present, mindful, and is learning to (re)ground herself in nature, especially through meditation, walks, and her current work around environmental justice.

US-based writer, community organizer, and Zen practitioner DOROTEA MENDOZA was born in the Philippines. She mostly writes fiction, and loves the flash form. At the center of all her work is her beloved homeland and her many kapwa Pilipino scattered around the globe. Dorotea is drawn to community-driven, collaborative projects, which is what Sari-Sari Women of Color Arts Coups is and has been from the start, even before it was officially known as Sari-Sari. She’s grateful to all the women she banters with, organizes with, writes and makes art with–I am because we are. If she isn’t writing, organizing, or in Zen practice, she’s tending to her 56 house plants in a small apartment in NYC (or watching Liverpool FC with her partner Matthew). You can visit her at www.doroteamendoza.com.