Steve Parke is an award-winning illustrator, designer, and photographer.
He worked for Prince for 13 years as his in-house art director at Paisley Park—doing everything from designing album covers and hand painting guitars to enlisting every spare pair of hands to melt candles for an impromptu music video.

His photography work with Prince has been published in numerous magazines, including People, Rolling Stone, and Vogue, as well as in books like Prince Stories from the Purple Underground. His own book of Prince photography from this time, Picturing Prince, was published in April 2017.

Steve currently serves as Photo Editor at Enchanted Living magazine and is a 5-year board member at PRN Alumni Foundation, 501(c)3 non-profit whose mission seeks to continue Prince’s philanthropic vision providing youth education and food sustainability, and support to fellow alumni in crisis.

Jacqui is an entrepreneur and CEO. She co-founded the award-winning agave-based spirit company, Revel, that crafts, manufactures, and imports the new category alcohol from the Mexican state of Morelos. She oversaw the supply chain logistics, operation, legal infrastructure development, and also designed the unique product bottle for this popular upscale product.

In the late ’90s at Prince’s creative home base Paisley Park, Jacqui helped create one of the music industry’s first standalone distribution channels for an independent artist; Prince’s NPG Records, which sold 250,000 records directly to the consumer, resulting in $12.5M in revenue, while overseeing all aspects of merchandising for international sales for the global icon.

As CEO of new Sonoma, California record label, Love Conquered Records, she runs many of the day-to-day operations while also still working in both artist and brand management. She is also the founder and current President of the 501(c)3 non-profit, PRN Alumni Foundation, which seeks to continue Prince’s philanthropic legacy in tribute to her former boss who inspired her professionally and personally.

Southern-born Kat Dyson traversed between Montreal, New York City, Minneapolis, and the City of Angels on a musical journey that lead her to share stages with diverse world-class artists such as Cyndi Lauper, Prince, Sheila E, Nona Hendryx, Divinity Roxx, Natalie Cole, Ivan Neville, Donny Osmond, T.I., Seal, Joi, George Clinton, and the P-Funk All-Stars, Musiq Soulchild, Phoebe Snow, Res, Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir, The Winans, Mary Mary, Yolanda Adams, Big Mama Thornton, Ben E. King, Bo Diddley, Odetta, Mick Jagger, Sarah McLachlan, Buddy Guy, BB King, Chaka Khan, Carlos Santana, Sting, and Stevie Wonder.

In June 2016, she participated in the BET Prince Tribute performance with Sheila E.  Later, in 2018, Kat was a part of Toshi Reagon’s special all-female super band (PowerJam) for AFROPUNK featuring a special appearance by Angela Davis.

Kat has appeared on many television talk shows and award shows.  She has recorded with a wide range of international artists while continuing to compose music for films, documentaries, and television.

She plays with three all-female Jazz/R&B bands; Jazz in the Pink, Hit Like a Girl, and Rock Sugah for the She Rocks Awards at the NAMM show. Kat has also been musical director for Jessica Care Moore’s blockbuster production ‘Black Women Rock’ for many years.

She is currently touring with an all-star funk band lead by Nikki Glaspie, featuring Nigel Hall (Lettuce) and Robert “Sput” Searight, and Dominique Xavier from Ghost-Note.

Bassist Rhonda Smith attended McGill University in Montreal and studied jazz performance.

She has worked with many notable Canadian artists and won a Juno award (Canadian equivalent of a Grammy) for Best Contemporary Jazz album for her work with Jim Hillman and the Merlin Factor.

Through a chance encounter with Sheila E., Rhonda auditioned for Prince and began recording parts on his Emancipation record the very same day. Rhonda spent nearly a decade touring and recording with Prince, including 88 sold-out dates with an audience of 1.4 million people on the critically acclaimed Musicology tour alone.

She has also played on both the Martin Short Show and The Wayne Brady Show and has been featured on both the covers of Bass Player and Bassics Magazines.

Rhonda has performed with Chaka Khan, Beyonce, Patti LaBelle, Brenda Russell, Erykah Badu, Najee, Candy Dulfer, Larry Graham, Little Richard, George Clinton, as well as others, has released two solo CDs, and is usually sharing the stage, these days, performing alongside Jeff Beck.

Hans-Martin Buff began his career as a recording engineer and music producer in 1993 at Pachyderm Studios, Minnesota, USA, where he made excellent coffee, and then proceeded to hone his studio chops by assisting on projects such as Live’s million-seller “Throwing Copper.”

Hans-Martin worked his way through various local rock’n’roll factories before he found a more permanent home at Prince’s Paisley Park Studios, whose personal engineer he became and remained for four funky years. During this period, he wasn’t only responsible for His Purple Majesty’s recordings, but also for the studio affairs of world-renowned artists, including No Doubt, Chaka Khan, and Larry Graham.

A native of Germany, Hans-Martin relocated to his home country in 2001, where he continued his career as an independent recording engineer and producer, and where he has since recorded, mixed, or produced a host of national and international talent, such as Mousse T., Joss Stone, Zucchero, Eric Burdon, Roachford, Maxi Priest and the Scorpions.

Hans-Martin has become an expert in the making of 3D-Audio for headphones, and regularly advises artists and industry professionals on its vast creative possibilities.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Mike Scott started playing guitar in local clubs by the tender age of 13. After graduating from the famed Duke Ellington School of Performing Arts, he immediately began a fruitful career on tours with artists such as Juicy and Peaches & Herb.

Mike emerged as an internationally renowned player and has been a session guitarist for Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, as well as Timbaland, where he cosigned on albums from Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, New Edition, Mary J Blige, Lionel Richie, Keri Hilson, Beyonce and countless others, including becoming the guitarist for Minneapolis music legend Prince and working alongside him for a decade.

He has also toured with Justin Timberlake on his Future Sex Love Sounds, 20/20, and Man of the Woods tours. He’s performed shows with Rihanna, Leona Lewis, Maroon 5, Jermaine Jackson, and Alicia Keys just to name a few, and has had numerous appearances on the small screen like in the Diddy/Mark Burnett Production, Starmaker, and The Vampire Diaries

KaNisa Williams is a lifelong computer enthusiast with a passion for humanizing technology. As an avid gamer and programmer from the age of 4 via her family’s Tandy 2000, she has grown up with a vested interest in technology, developing websites for local arts organizations from the age of 11, graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and turning her love affair with digital solutions into a career in Human-Computer Interaction and Organizational Ergonomics.

KaNisa is currently a Senior Lead Technologist at Booz Allen Hamilton working in the capacity of an Agile Coach. In this role she works as a consultant in Agile software methodology transformations for large organizations, teaches classes in these topics, and coaches teams in optimizing their group dynamics, when she herself is not facilitating development teams as a Scrum Master. KaNisa also leads a cohort of Human Computer Interaction professionals for her market! She wears a lot of hats!

Outside of work life, KaNisa is known as “Darling Nisi” and she lends her talents to help be a purple signal boost, especially in regard to self-reflection through the study and appreciation of Prince. She is the host of the Muse 2 the Pharaoh podcast, where she explores purple topics from a female perspective. KaNisa also maintains a purple presence on Tumblr and Twitter to help spread the message of compassion toward others, but more importantly toward self, through the lessons found in the music of Prince.

Prince is arguably the greatest musical artist of all time. Although he is widely heralded for his genius as a musician, composer, producer, and performer, one aspect of his incomparable talent that is often overlooked is his lyric writing. However, Prince was a wordsmith, a skilled storyteller who employed various literary genres and devices to arouse the imaginations and challenge the thinking of his listeners. As his career progressed, he increasingly integrated a black literary aesthetic into his songs to assert his beliefs and effect social change while affirming his identity as a member of the black community. The presentation will examine the song “Don’t Play Me” as an exemplar of Prince’s use of a black literary aesthetic.

Kamilah Cummings is a writer, editor, and visiting senior lecturer at DePaul University in Chicago. She has presented on Prince at Purple Reign, the first academic Prince conference (University of Salford, UK), and at Polished Solid Prince symposia at New York University, Spelman College, and online. She has also presented on Prince at The 2021 Pop Convergence (PopCon). Her work on Prince has been published in the Howard Journal of Communications special issue Prince in/as Blackness . . . and Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (Bloomsbury). She has also created the course, Prince: A New Breed Leader. A House music researcher as well, she created the course The House Chicago Built, has presented on House music at Black Portraiture[s] IV (Harvard University), and appears in the documentary The Woodstock of House. She is passionate about exploring the intersections of race and identity in media and pop culture, with a particular focus on centering blackness in the narratives of black people.

Elliott H. Powell is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. His work merges critical race, feminist, and queer theory to consider the political implications of Black popular music. Writings from these research areas are published or forthcoming in The Black Scholar, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies. He is currently at work on a manuscript, Prince, Porn, and Public Sex, which explores the politics of sex(uality) and music in 1980s Minneapolis and recently released Sounds from the Other Side: Afro–South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music.

Prince’s first and only acoustic album, 1997’s The Truth, showcases the artist’s virtuosic guitar playing, clever, imaginative songwriting, and signature vocal delivery and production. But in peeling back the layers of the album’s 12 songs we discover something more: The Truth isn’t simply a collection of stripped-down tunes delivered at the height of O(+>’s pursuit of creative autonomy; it’s a masterclass in African American music, melding elements of gospel, the blues, and soul to form the connective tissue between songs exploring grief, loss, spirituality, and maturation.

Rhonda Nicole is a Los Angeles-based independent singer/songwriter, music journalist, and social and digital marketing consultant, whose life officially turned purple in 1984. As the managing editor for the now-defunct SoulTrain.com, she interviewed a number of Prince-related artists including Jill Jones, Taja Sevelle, fDeluxe, Liv Warfield, and Andy Allo. She’s currently the director of social media for the National Museum of African American Music, which opened in Nashville in January 2021. Rhonda Nicole’s 2010 debut EP, Nuda Veritas, and self-produced 2020 releases, Radical Ecstasy and Home are available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms.

The Truth is a continuation of o(+>’s discourse, which has been to make listeners face their subjective realities and not be hypocritical about them. This is the first step toward freedom and evolution. The second step is understanding and accepting who one is and then working to evolve to a higher form. His work proves that freedom, no matter how difficult the struggle, no matter how lonely the road, is worth whatever one must endure to gain it. One can only evolve when one breaks free of the lies and the illusion of the physical. Further still, true emancipation means being able to break free of the lies that cause fear and selfishness so that people are able to love.  Loving others is an emancipation that comes when people believe that love, not money, will save us. Yet, this emancipation can only occur once people are willing to take the steps and do the difficult and, often, painful work of thinking critically about all that one has been taught and exposing oneself to as much information as possible, especially in regards to the physical and metaphysical intersection of “reality,” to know what the truth is.

C. Liegh McInnis is a poet, short story writer, instructor of English at Jackson State University, the former publisher and editor of Black Magnolias Literary Journal, and the author of eight books, including four collections of poetry, one collection of short fiction (Scripts: Sketches and Tales of Urban Mississippi), one work of literary criticism (The Lyrics of Prince: A Literary Look at a Creative, Musical Poet, Philosopher, and Storyteller), and one co-authored work, Brother Hollis: The Sankofa of a Movement Man, which discusses the life of a legendary Mississippi Civil Rights icon. He is also a former First Runner-Up of the Amiri Baraka/Sonia Sanchez Poetry Award sponsored by North Carolina State A&T. He has presented papers at national conferences, such as College Language Association, the National Council of Black Studies, the Neo-Griot Conference, and the Black Arts Movement Festival, and his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Southern Quarterly, Konch Magazine, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Down to the Dark River: An Anthology of Poems on the Mississippi River, Black Hollywood Unchained: Essays about Hollywood’s Portrayal of African Americans, Black Panther: Paradigm Shift or Not? A Collection of Reviews and Essays on the Blockbuster Film, Asymptote, The Pierian, Black Gold: An Anthology of Black Poetry, Sable, New Delta Review, The Black World Today, In Motion Magazine, MultiCultural Review, A Deeper Shade, New Laurel Review, ChickenBones, Oxford American, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, B. K. Nation, Red Ochre Lit, and Brick Street Press Anthology. In January of 2009, C. Liegh, along with eight other poets, was invited by the NAACP to read poetry in Washington, DC, for their Inaugural Poetry Reading celebrating the election of President Barack Obama. He has also been invited by colleges and libraries all over the country to read his poetry and fiction and to lecture on various topics, such as creative writing and various aspects of African American literature, music, and history.

McInnis can be contacted through:
Psychedelic Literature
203 Lynn Lane
Clinton, MS 39056
601 383 0024
psychedeliclit@bellsouth.net

Miles Marshall Lewis has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, GQ.com, Essence, and many other publications. His work has appeared in Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, Hip-Hop: A Cultural Odyssey, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and elsewhere. He’s also the author of Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises.

Zaheer Ali is a historian and scholar of 20th century United States and African-American history. He is currently the inaugural executive director of the Lawrenceville School’s Hutchins Center for Race and Social Justice and an adjunct lecturer at New York University, where he taught a Spring 2017 course titled, “Prince: Sign of the Times,” an examination of Prince’s life and legacy in American history and culture. He’s presented his scholarship on Prince at conferences at Yale, Salford University in Manchester, England, and the University of Minnesota.