Sikivu Hutchinson (Writer/Producer/Director) is an educator, author and playwright.  She received her doctorate from New York University and is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (2003), Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (2011), Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (2013) and the novel White Nights, Black Paradise (2015), on Peoples Temple and the 1978 Jonestown massacre.  She also wrote, directed and produced a short film of White Nights, Black Paradise and is currently working on a stage adaptation. Her short play Grinning Skull was featured in the Robey Theatre’s 2017 Paul Robeson Festival. She has contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Secularism and Gender and Planning from Rutgers University and her articles have been published in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches, The Humanist Magazine and the L.A. Times.  She is a contributing editor for The Feminist Wire and the founder of the Women’s Leadership Project, a feminist mentoring program for girls of color in South L.A.  In 2016, she was a keynote speaker at the Mandela and Kathrada Foundations’ Anti-Racism Network conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2022 she staged her novel Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic: The Life and Times of Rory Tharpe, as a play at the Hollywood Fringe Festival.