Can you guess who's speaking at RISE?
When was the last time you felt at home — somewhere that wasn't your home?
Take a second feeling that.
Maybe it was a room full of strangers who somehow already knew your language. A concert. A kitchen table. A city you'd never been to before.
For me, it was New York.
I remember looking up at the skyline and feeling held — by something enormous and unapologetic. New York doesn't shrink for anyone. And standing in the middle of all that bigness, something in my chest finally let go.
New York doesn't ask me to choose between identities.
In this city, I am not too loud, not too much, not too anything. I walk these streets and see myself — in pieces and in full. A look on the subway. A room where queerness just is. My immigrant story alongside so many others. Danish fastelavnsboller marking carnival, still part of me. An Eid invitation reconnecting me to my Comorian roots. My n'between everything — held, without apology.
For the first time, I don't have to translate myself to be understood.
My home in New York. A different rhythm. A louder welcome. And still — mine.
That's why RISE is here. In this city. In this room.
Because New York holds complexity like nowhere else — and so do the people joining us this May. Every single one of them has grappled with what it costs to live between worlds.
And I have to tell you — I am so excited of who is walking through that door with us this May.
Every single speaker was chosen with intention. They don't just know the n'between — they are it. This lineup is not an accident.
Two built a world out of fabric and identity, asking what belonging looks like when you wear it — when you stop dressing for the room and start dressing for yourself.
One wrote their healing into a book. A memoir that holds trauma, multiplicity, and fire — and refuses to let any of those things cancel each other out.
One has spent decades doing the slow, unglamorous, quietly radical work of rebuilding people from the inside out — in favelas, in conflict zones, in the rooms no one else wanted to enter.
And then there are the ones who've lived it. In ways that will make you feel seen before they even finish their first sentence.
We're not going to tell you their names here.
We want you to find them.
→ Reveal the secret - meet the RISE speakers here
Because here's what I know after years of working with people like us:
The loneliness doesn't come from being different.
It comes from never seeing yourself fully reflected. From walking into room after room and having to shrink some part of yourself just to fit through the door. From the exhausting, invisible labor of code-switching — and the quiet grief of wondering if anyone actually sees you, not just the version of you that's easiest to understand.
And then — sometimes, unexpectedly — you find a room that changes that.
Not because everyone in it looks like you. But because everyone in it gets it.
The being too much. The not enough. The living between worlds that don't fully claim you.
That's what RISE is. Your n'betweener homecoming.
RISE is a full day of talks, panels, workshops, and something harder to name — the feeling of being in a room where you don't have to perform wholeness. Where your contradictions are welcome. Where the story you've been carrying quietly finally gets to be told out loud.
It's electric. It's intimate. It will move you.
RISE: The n'betweener® Homecoming May 2, 2026 | Home Studios, Union Square, New York City In-person + virtual tickets available
You don't need to choose one version of yourself to be here. You already belong.
XO,
Nora