Kristie Soares is an assistant professor of Women & Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also an active performance artist invested in decolonial theater traditions such as spoken word poetry and Theatre of the Oppressed. Both her performance work and her research explore issues of queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities. Her current book project, Salsa Epistemology, engages with salsa — a music and dance tradition — to show how embodied playfulness figures as an integral part of queer activism in the Spanish Caribbean diaspora.