Heart-wrenching yet delicate words from Williamsburg-based author, poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan have appeared everywhere from The New York Times and The Missouri Review to Poetry Magazine and Guernica. At intimate readings hosted for Brooklyn’s literary community in her own backyard, Alyan can appear soft-spoken. Don’t be fooled.

There’s real power behind this Palestinian- American’s voice, encapsulated in stanzas of her acclaimed poetry volume “The Twenty-Ninth Year,” an elegiac autobiography that leaps from war-torn cities in the Middle East to Brooklyn brownstones as easily as it does from alcoholism to recovery. One poem titled “Moral Inventory” offers a particular gut punch: “Maybe I’m more like Manhattan than I want to admit: prettier when lit.”

Born in Carbondale, Illinois, Alyan also grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, Maine and Lebanon. Her family moved to Kuwait but sought political asylum in the U.S. when Iraqi forces invaded the country. She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University and has practiced part-time at NYU’s Counseling Center — an intense technical training that taught Alyan to navigate the tenuous emotions at play throughout her own writing.

She’s also a novelist and actress. Her 2017 debut novel, “Salt Houses,” won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award. Her sophomore novel, “The Arsonist’s City” (2021), shares a rich family story and a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East. Kirkus Reviews called it “painful and joyous, sad and funny — impossible to put down.”

In addition to publishing Alyan’s poetry, The New Yorker reviewed “Tallahassee,” a short film Alyan created and stars in with Darine Hotait, where “a woman covers up her struggles, and finds herself disconnected at a family celebration.” The film was nominated for Best Narrative Short Film at the Cairo Shorts Film Festival last December.

Walk into the current exhibit at the Museum of Future Experiences (MoFE) and you will be asked to contemplate the ancient question: “Who am I?” The MoFE take is that we’re all connected, woven inextricably together in the great cosmic quilt. It’s not, of course, a new point of view. What’s different here is how the folks at MoFE nudge you to that awareness — through a 20ish-minute guided meditation-poem with your eyes closed, followed by an equally long, surreal virtual reality experience featuring forests, fractals, splitting cells and one giant floating space fetus. (The evocation of “2001: A Space Odyssey” is not totally accidental.)

David Askaryan is the CEO and founder of MoFE, which is based in Williamsburg and is the latest local take on the sort of immersive experiences that seek to stimulate all five senses while simultaneously catering to the Instagram crowd. Previous exhibit-experiences since MoFE opened last June have included a riff on liminal spaces as well as a spooky virtual Halloween story set in Florida.

“Our core mission is to show people something they’ve never seen before,” Askaryan tells Brooklyn Magazine. In showing people something new, he says, MoFE is by definition offering a future experience.

A graduate of Harvard Business School, Askaryan, who is ethnically Armenian, was born in Azerbaijan. By the time he was 5, his family had moved to Uzbekistan and then Moscow before landing in Tampa, Florida. He has worked in the world of finance — from venture capital to hedge funds — but he’s also been a traveling musician and on staff at a slew of theater productions of the experimental kind.

It is no surprise, then, that MoFE is also more than one thing. Part immersive space and part production studio, the destination showcases the many facets of the VR experience by making use of a state-of-the art speaker system that allows for 360-degree soundscapes. Askaryan is already dreaming of expanding into other cities and offering the museum as a subscription-based online hub for virtual visitors with headsets at home.

“Seeing something you’ve never seen before is a great way to experience curiosity, awe, to see what’s possible,” he says. In an era of data-driven storytelling, he adds, “those feelings are getting more and more rare. And those feelings are an important part of being a human.”

Elijah Bah opened his vegetarian and vegan-friendly cafe, Nûrish, on Washington Avenue just four months before the pandemic shut the city down.

“During the time when we’re supposed to be busy and flourishing is when the pandemic hit,” he told Inside Hook in 2020. “So it’s like, whoa, but it does make it a lot easier for me just because everyone else is going through the same thing, so it’s not like I’m alone in this. The whole world is going through it.” He pivoted to takeout and curbside just like everyone else who muddled through, plus he teamed up with World Central Kitchen to provide meals for healthcare workers at nearby hospitals.

Bah is nothing if not resilient. Born in Guinea, he immigrated to the Bronx at 14 before ultimately landing in Brooklyn. Since high school, he’s worked in kitchens at predominantly vegetarian places that relied on local resources. The menu he’s crafted at Nûrish — just on the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights — does just what the name promises. There are hearty yet simple salads, sandwiches, wraps, smoothies, breakfast platters and grain bowls that lean into his veggie-centric West African heritage, plus sustainable meat options so carnivores don’t feel left out.

His survival in an industry rife with failure is a testament not only to his cooking, but to his personality. Walk into Nûrish today at any given time and you’re likely to find him working the espresso machine or schmoozing with his patrons.

“People walk in here all the time and look for the owner while I’m standing right there. I want to be visible and show that yes, we are able to do this as young Black men,” he told Black-Owned Brooklyn, adding, “A guy like me — you know, an immigrant from Guinea with a high school diploma — is not supposed to have something like this in a neighborhood like this.”

Donnel Baird dreams big — like, saving- the-planet big. And he is starting right here in Brooklyn.

Born and raised in Bed- Stuy, Baird grew up in an apartment with a dysfunctional heating system. He was far from alone: Around 70 percent of the city’s buildings use oil- or gas-powered boilers, many of them rundown to the point of inefficiency, many of them spewing potentially dangerous fumes.

In Brownsville, for example, 73 percent of residential buildings have some kind of “maintenance defect,” resulting in asthma rates close to double the New York City average.

Baird didn’t start thinking about the potential synergy of mitigating the climate crisis and tackling socioeconomic issues until his time as an undergrad at Duke. After graduating, he became a community organizer in Brooklyn and then worked for the Obama administration’s energy department retrofitting low-income residences across the city with more energy-efficient electric heating systems.

At Columbia Business School, he developed an idea so good that the U.S. Department of Energy invested $2 million into it — while he was still a student. The pitch: Create a private company that could perform similar residential energy system retrofitting on a large enough scale to actually dent the climate crisis and create equity in low- income communities.

The question was how such an entity could become and stay profitable. The answer: It would shave off so much of the energy costs that the company and its investors could all get a cut of the savings. Plus, solar panels on residential roofs for maximum green efficiency would actually create surplus energy, which could be stored in basement batteries and sold back to energy grids — in Baird’s vision, by local-owned cooperatives. And the installation of all the systems could create construction and other jobs in the communities.

With the initial funding, Baird founded BlocPower in 2012. Since then, the company has retrofitted over 1,200 buildings and is now working with the city of Ithaca on the country’s first citywide residential electrification project (with the help of millions from the likes of Microsoft and Goldman Sachs). It has been recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies by Time and Fast Company.

“I just know in my bones that we can address the climate crisis at scale,” Baird told Fast Company in March. “I don’t know if we will. But I know we can.”

Fela Barclift has not only raised her four children in Bed-Stuy, she’s educated four generations of Bed-Stuy kids.

In 1981, after looking for a daycare that would give her eldest exposure to people who looked like her — and had books that championed Black heroes and dolls that were Black and brown — she came up woefully short. Recalling her own traumatic schooling in the South, Barclift decided to start her own school. She launched Little Sun People preschool in her brownstone the following year.

“I see the difference when we teach our children about having pride in themselves, their family, their community and who they are,” “Mama” Fela told the Associated Press last year. “It creates such a strong sense of self-assurance and a sense of confidence and belonging.”

For 40 years now, Barclift has fostered a community around an Afrocentric worldview, teaching kids about trailblazers like Rosa Parks and Malcom X decades before “critical race theory” entered (and became warped by) the public discourse. “Everything I had ever heard about Africa was negative, horrible. And I didn’t want to be associated with that,” Barclift told Spectrum News NY1 last fall.

That vision has paid off not just for hundreds of Brooklyn youth, but for Barlcift herself, who was named one of the winners of last fall’s David Prize, an annual $200,000 award for select New York City residents, named after billionaire real estate developer David C. Walentas of Two Trees Management Company.

“I remember learning Swahili, how to play the drum, lots of reading, singing Afrocentric songs and being a part of culturally based shows,” one Little Sun People alum wrote in New York Amsterdam News in 2017.

Since her early days, Barclift has earned a bachelor’s degree in education and political science from Brooklyn College, and a master’s degree in administration and supervision from Bank Street College.

Next up, she plans to extend her school to include kindergarten through fifth grade and is authoring a book of poetry and affirmations for young Black and brown children that can be used in classrooms everywhere.

“My educational experience was a nightmare, to say the least,” Barclift told NY1. “I never felt like I belonged.” She does now.

Pick any flavor at Malai, the Carroll Gardens ice cream parlor that’s among the very best in New York City, and founder Pooja Bavishi can tell you a story about it, usually involving a childhood memory: Her parents immigrated to North Carolina from Gujarat, northwest India, though these days they live in Brooklyn.

Although Bavishi is a determined entrepreneur — a graduate of both the London School of Economics and NYU’s Stern School of Business, who turned a makeshift booth at the Hester Street Fair in 2015 into a beloved operation that ships nationwide — the ice cream at Malai remains deeply personal, with each of the nearly 50 flavors a way for her to explore, preserve and celebrate her Indian heritage.

“Every single flavor at Malai is sparked by a memory of India,” Bavishi told the India Food Network last year. “We have a carrot halwa flavor and that’s inspired by my dad, who loves the Indian sweet. But he will only eat carrot halwa with a scoop of ice cream. Obviously, I needed to create this flavor. We also have a sweet corn saffron, and that references my memories of eating the makai do sheero halwa that my [aunt] used to make.”

In addition to making excellent ice cream (and baked goods; do not sleep on her Gulab Jamun Ice Cream Cake), Bavishi embraces her role as leader, collaborator and mentor. “Being a woman of color in any leadership position presents additional obstacles and setbacks than what one might otherwise face,” she told Gothamist when the parlor first opened. “Every step that we take legitimizes Malai even more, and it makes us a more established player in the ice cream world and in the New York food scene. Which is important for me and for other women who might follow.”

Last summer, Bed-Stuy model and actress Leyna Bloom made a historic splash as the first transgender woman of color to grace the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Before that, in 2019, she was the first transgender actor of color to premiere a movie at the Cannes Film Festival. “I need to do things, I need to tell stories, I need to dance in ways that can express harmony and emotions differently,” Bloom said at the time. “So people can see things differently and maybe they can learn about people like me.”

Bloom moved to New York when she was 17 and eventually found her way to Bed-Stuy, a place with “a lot of the culture of Black and brown bodies,” Bloom said. In those early days in the city, she joined a ballroom community that helped her through homelessness. She was discovered in a store while casually flipping through a lookbook of Victoria’s Secret models. The person who discovered her? The wife of the photographer who took the pictures Bloom was looking at. Since that fateful discovery, she has starred in the Martin Scorsese-produced film “Port Authority” and had a recurring role in the final season of “Pose.”

What comes next for Bloom is clear: “My mission before I die is to be on the cover of every magazine I’ve ever wanted to be on. I’m young, I’m in my prime, I can do that,” she said to Interview Magazine.

When Halsey & Lewis was forced to shutter in July of 2021, the loss of the eclectic Black-owned record shop and community hub came as a blow to its Bed-Stuy neighbors. Fortunately, owners Martin Brewer and Sonya Farrell have gotten used to pivoting. (Brewer ran his previous shop, Tangerine, in a pre-gentrified Park Slope from 1997 to 2002 until the rent got too damn high.)

In February, Brewer and Farrell reopened Halsey & Lewis in Bed-Stuy, this time on Madison Street and Marcus Garvey Boulevard. In April, they renamed it Black Star Vinyl (the name Halsey & Lewis had been a reference to the intersection of the store’s previous location). There you will find Brewer on any given day, just as likely to suggest a Nina Simone record as he is a book of photographs, vintage decor or junkyard art.

The new store is spacious and across the street from the Israel Putnam Playground. That’s by design. Farrell is also a real estate agent and found a location where Black Star can begin to host the community again. The new shop with a new name is the right size to throw concerts, movie nights and DJ sets, all of which Black Star Vinyl has in the works.

When the city ordered businesses to pause regular services because of Covid in the spring of 2020, Brewer and Farrell pivoted to delivery and curbside pickup. Farrell also created #ShareTheHealth, a program to provide resources to Brooklyn homeless shelters. Friends and fans of their store pooled resources to provide money, masks and other sanitary items to the most vulnerable Brooklynites at the height of the pandemic.

Farrell also runs Let’s Get on the Bus, an organization that provides enriching field trips for underserved youth to promote civic engagement and social justice. Their most frequent destination is the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Artist and activist Wildcat Ebony Brown started her career as a professional model. Today she’s just as comfortable behind the camera as she is in front of it, serving as a production assistant on music videos for The Roots and crafting capes for the political art collective the Wide Awakes, which she got involved with through close friend Hank Willis Thomas. (Look to her to break the ice and get the dancing started at a block party, empowering bystanders to let loose their best moves.)

The Tulsa-born talent calls Ditmas Park home, where she draws inspiration from the neighborhood’s vibrant multiculturalism. “I love that I hear different accents around me as soon as I walk out of my apartment,” Brown told Brooklyn Magazine last October. “I love that I see all different shades of skin around me. I love that people bring their culture to New York City and it thrives in communities such as this.”

Brown flies under the mainstream radar, but those in the know see her everywhere. Her artwork has been showcased in group exhibitions like September 2020’s “We Will Meet Again,” curated by Rob Aloia of Outlaw Arts and Bari Schlosser in collaboration with New Apostle Gallery at Williamsburg’s Dobbin Street Event Space. In March 2021, ArtNet highlighted Brown’s first-ever feminist crypto art drop celebrating International Women’s Day, alongside artists Michele Pred and Bud Snow. Three months later Brown appeared on the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Fort Greene as the looming central figure of a mural by Helina Metaferia celebrating Black female activists.

She’s wielding bright colors and radical joy against the powers that be in new ways every day, like when she joined Questlove for the Winter Jazz Fest at House of Yes in January 2022. With a fashion line of her own on the horizon, you won’t even need to catch Brown in person to see her on Brooklyn’s streets.

At 29, Cole Doman is already an indie stalwart. In Chicago, he studied acting under Oscar-winner Tarell Alvin McCraney (“Moonlight”). In 2015, he landed the lead in director Stephen Cone’s gay classic “Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party.” He was in the film “Uncle Frank” and has had roles on TV’s “Modern Family,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Chicago P.D.,” “Equal” and “Shameless.”

But 2022 is proving to be a watershed year for Doman. He’s currently shooting the second season of “Gossip Girl,” on which he plays Rex Huntington, and in January he starred in the hit short film “Starfuckers,” which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. In it, Doman and director/costar Antonio Marizale (who wrote the screenplay based on a story by Doman) play actors out for revenge against a Hollywood executive who promised acting jobs — that never materialized — in exchange for sex. The short also played to enthusiastic audiences at the Berlin International Film Festival in February.

Later this year, Doman stars in director Matthew Fifer’s new horror film, “Treatment,” about a troubled gay millennial who moves back to his childhood home after a disastrous breakup, only to discover that his town is shrouded in a history of violent homophobic terror. And “Starfuckers” could yet be turned into a feature film. When Brooklyn Magazine spoke with Doman during Sundance, he said he’s working with Marizale on a feature-length version of the script.

Multi-hyphenate creative Sara Elise works primarily in the wellness and hospitality fields — she is the founder of Harvest & Revel, a Brooklyn-based alternative catering company that grew out of her 2012 project Bed Stuy Kitchen. For the past decade, the company is known for feeding people elegant and sensory cuisine sourced from organic, local, and seasonal ingredients. But feeding can mean more than food.

Early on in New York, Elise says she found herself living in a food desert, which inspired her to leverage her business education and professional experience in private wealth management to transform her community’s relationship with nutrition and sustainability. Today, Harvest & Revel caters weddings and events for larger-scale clients, such as Steve Madden, Etsy, Instagram, and Democracy Now!, and uses those funds to be able to work with smaller clients such as local artist organizations, food justice projects, and New York City galleries.

“Food and wellness are important because they determine the type of person you are,” Elise told NYLON Magazine. “They determine the way you’re going to act/interact with people, and how you interact with people determines the types of opportunities you’re afforded. The opportunities you’re afforded determine the type of life you end up leading.”

She’s also a cofounder and designer at Apogeo Collective, a boutique bed-and-breakfast in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, that provides queer and trans people of color with rustic luxury and adventure in safe, supportive spaces. And she’s at work on a forthcoming book with Harper Collins titled “A Recipe for More.”

Her light attracts stars. Last summer the Daily Mail published shots of Elise enjoying a Brooklyn lunch date with friend Zoë Kravitz, who “had a huge smile on her face while sipping on a glass of wine,” as the publication noted, adding that “Sara looked equally as trendy in a muted green wrap top and a pair of wide- legged pants.”

When Bonnie’s, a Cantonese spot by chef and owner Calvin Eng, opened in Williamsburg earlier this year, the city’s culinary masses flocked to the space — and hype for the unique restaurant has yet to die down.

That’s thanks to Eng, whose remarkable gastronomic skills have earned the attention of critics, locals and the sort of foodies who happily traverse the city in search of the next delicious thing.

Born in a Cantonese household in Bay Ridge, the 26-year-old chef learned how to cook from his mother, Mew Ha Chew, whose American nickname is Bonnie. “Everything I know about Cantonese food I learned from her and through her,” Eng told Brooklyn Magazine in December.

A former chef at dim sum parlor Nom Wah and, after that, the chef de cuisine at Taiwanese American restaurant Win Son, Eng is adamant about Bonnie’s position in the Cantonese culinary canon: He is not trying to serve you the sort of food that you can only get on a trip to China. Instead, Eng focuses on the American version of the fare that his mom prepared while he was growing up. There is, for example, a can’t-miss gourmet version of the McDonald’s McRib featured prominently on the menu. Enjoy it along with the szechuan cacio e pepe. “Everything on the menu has a story, and every story came naturally because it was literally just my ideas and background and upbringing all coming together in each dish,” he says. “It’s all personal.”

And it’s paying off. In March, Eng was named a James Beard finalist for 2022 (the winners will not be announced before this goes to press).

Masquerade, a tapas bar that serves Iranian treats for under $12 in Williamsburg, is a lively, relaxing spot that harks back to the sort of Brooklyn that social media has all but ruined. The excitement sparked by simply walking through the doors comes directly from co-owners Pouya Esghai and Siavash Karampour, who are both from Tehran and are just as fun and down-to-earth as the spot they’ve built.

Hoping to create, in their words, “an imaginary Tehran” that blends 1970s Iran with present-day New York “with an element of Mardi Gras thrown in,” the duo is quick to note the difficulty involved in standing out amid a number of new Iranian restaurants that have recently landed on the scene. But they have risen to the challenge by offering their vision of a pre-revolutionary yet modern Iran evoked via food, cocktails and ambiance.

“The traditional Persian restaurants are outdated,” Karampour told Brooklyn Magazine earlier this year. “They don’t cater to the modern tastes of the young Iranians. The dishes are so cliché — kabobs, kabobs and kabobs. The newer generation feels the need to have a better representation in terms of taste, especially in New York.” Be sure to try the creamy kashk o bademjoon eggplant dip and the fresenjoon meatball stew.

This life-affirming culinary expression comes against a backdrop of tragedy. Esghai and Karampour came to the U.S. as members of the underground rock group The Yellow Dogs, which sought asylum (and freedom) here in 2010. Iran is a country notoriously hostile to their kind of music. By 2013 the band had become a fixture in the local music scene when violence found them anyway: a deranged rival musician, also from Iran, killed two of the group’s members in a murder- suicide that claimed the lives of four. Esghai was there and survived unscathed. Karampour, luckily, was out of town at the time.

The two have since put their rock star dreams on ice, focusing instead on manifesting the Tehran they’d love to see in the world — right here in Brooklyn. Masquerade opened in October 2021, because the two had nothing else to do, they said. There had been a pandemic; they were underemployed. “We always wanted to open our own bar,” they told Greenpointers in May.

Freedom never tasted better.

A growing number of New Yorkers have seen — and own — some of the vintage goods that Kevin Fallon sells on his Instagram account (34,000 followers) and from the storefront he operates on Bogart Street, both called Fantasy Explosion.

Think of his platform/business as a love letter to the city. On Fantasy Explosion, scrollers come face-to-face with a vast variety of T-shirts, hats, totes, sweaters, mugs and the occasional odd object (a USPS balaclava, for example) that mostly directly relate to New York institutions and ideas. It’s Zizmorecore to the core. Or, as he told GQ, “My favorite stuff is from businesses that had no place making any clothes in the first place.”

Fallon, who grew up in Rhode Island, has repeatedly addressed the importance of vintage finds in connection to one’s memories. “Originally, I was finding things that were important to me because I’d been there,” he told The New York Times. “‘I had a sandwich at this place,’ [for example]. But that feeling for me started turning into, ‘Whoa, what does this mean to other people?’”

When Emily Gallagher won the race for state assembly in New York’s 50th district in July 2020, she defeated 47-year incumbent Joe Lentol in a stunning upset — and a win for progressives.

Gallagher, a self-described socialist who had previously been a member of Brooklyn Community Board 1, ran on a platform of environmental sustainability, housing justice and transit improvement — all issues she describes as fundamentally local.

“The state is much more broken than the city,” she told The City during that race. “A lot of people that I talk to, when they have complaints, don’t even know that the issue is a state issue — all the housing stuff, the MTA, water- quality standards.”

Gallagher, who represents parts of Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Fort Greene, grew up in Rochester and has been known to rock a Black Flag T-shirt. Now 38, she moved to Greenpoint shortly after graduating from Ithaca College in 2006. Her first foray into politics came in 2016, when she ran unsuccessfully for Democratic leader of New York’s 50th district against 32-year incumbent Linda Minucci, losing with 44.9 percent of the vote.

She was soon thereafter appointed to Brooklyn Community Board 1, where she uncovered community board abuses. When she suggested that the board use special city council funds for a service that tracks constituent issues, the board revealed it bought an SUV instead. (Whoopsie.) “I try to choose battles that are activist battles,” she told The City.

Since taking office, Gallagher has introduced the All-Electric Buildings Act with New York State Senator Brian Kavanagh, arguing it would cut the state’s carbon emissions by millions of tons. And she’s pushed for greater financial transparency, writing in Crain’s New York Business: “When anonymous limited- liability companies can gobble up New York City apartments and buildings with almost no oversight, everybody loses — except for oligarchs, tax cheats and bad landlords.”

“Revenue remains my biggest priority, and winning the fight to tax the kinds of wealth that have not previously been in the lexicon of what was available to the state,” she told Greenpointers about her goals for office. “That would help us solve a lot of our problems. We really just need more money, and we need it to come from people who can spare it.”

Iván García and Gerardo Zabaleta, two lovers who immigrated from Puebla City, Mexico, over 20 years ago, didn’t come at the same time. García moved to New York first and worked entry-level positions in kitchens across the city. When Zabaleta, a teacher, couldn’t stand being apart from García anymore, he left his job behind and made the journey to the U.S. and ultimately to New York.

Here, the pair built names for themselves in the city’s culinary scene: there wasn’t a job they wouldn’t do. Their expertise in every facet of the restaurant business eventually led to García’s elevation to chef positions and Zabaleta’s rise to management.

Today the couple owns two popular restaurants in Williamsburg: Zona Rosa and Mesa Coyoacan. “I’m talented, and they love talent over here,” Garcia told Brooklyn Magazine earlier this year.

García says it was his chiles en nogada recipe that made Zabaleta fall in love with him in the first place and, in turn, homegrown dishes like the chiles en nogada have made Brooklyn fall in love with the couple. Chiles en nogada is a seasonal dish in Puebla City, but thanks to international markets, García can buy its ingredients (pomegranate, peaches, apples and walnuts) year- round. Their little slice of Brooklyn is among the few places in the city where you can have chiles en nogada whenever you want.

García and Zabaleta’s journey as young lovers was recently captured in a new movie — a hybrid of documentary and dramatization — by director Heidi Ewing, who is friends with the couple. “I Carry You With Me” depicts their treacherous journey crossing the Mexican border into the U.S. The movie also tells of García’s longing for his son, Ricky, who remains in Mexico with his mother. The chef isn’t able to leave the country for fear that he won’t be allowed to return, and Ricky’s visa to visit was recently denied. Father and son haven’t seen each other in 20 years, but they’re hoping to reunite by 2023.

Black-Owned Brooklyn started in 2018 as a passion project blog to provide a curated guide to Brooklyn-based Black-owned brands, shops and businesses — and to tell the stories of the people behind those businesses.

In 2022, Black-Owned Brooklyn is still that and more. The site and its social media extensions have evolved into a vital borough-wide resource and place for community with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. You’ll find stories about everything from a Flatbush-based family-owned independent cafe-bookstore to a Jamaican dumpling house to an analog photography store to cosmetic tattoo studios to a history of Fort Greene’s Afropunk festival.

“It’s a documentation of culture, history and business in Black Brooklyn,” said Cynthia Gordy Giwa, who runs the site with her husband, Tayo Giwa, from their home in Bed-Stuy. “The media narrative about Black people in Brooklyn is so often relegated to stories of loss and push-out and other things that are important to spotlight. But there’s this whole other universe of stories and experiences that we experience and see on a daily basis. We wanted to create a platform that celebrated them in a way that is joyful and authentic and beautiful.”

And passionate. The Giwas, who each have day jobs, aren’t making a dime off the site, which they update about once a week. “What we strive to be is a place where we are putting front and center the breadth of the Black diaspora in Brooklyn in a way that is intergenerational, that is connecting people,” said Tayo Giwa. “A lot of spaces sometimes can be very siloed, and we definitely want to show all that is Black Brooklyn, all the different types of people.”

A mention on Black-Owned Brooklyn can provide a bump in traffic to a profiled shop. But it takes a little something special to get profiled in the first place. “We’re storytellers, so we’re looking for a business with an interesting story that we find compelling that might be having long-standing ties to Brooklyn,” said Cynthia, who in a previous life was a journalist who covered the Obama White House.

And when they’re not working at their day jobs or updating Black- Owned Brooklyn, the couple are now also filmmakers; the two created a short documentary about Soul Summit, the long-running festival in Fort Greene Park. More recently, their “The Sun Rises in The East” tells the story of The East, a pan-African cultural organization founded in 1969 by Bed-Stuy teens and young adults. Led by educator and activist Jitu Weusi, The East embodied Black self- determination, building dozens of institutions, including its own African-centered school, food co-op, newsmagazine, record label, restaurant, clothing shop and bookstore.

Last week, the couple is threw their inaugural Juneteenth Food Festival with Weeksville Heritage Center, highlighting 20 local food vendors and a small marketplace of non-food vendors, with a focus on food across the Black diaspora.

Eric Gonzalez made history in November 2017 when he became the first Latino district attorney elected in New York State. He assumed the post after the 2016 death of Ken Thompson, who three years earlier had become the first Black D.A. in Brooklyn.

But with a promise to helm “the most progressive D.A.’s office in the country,” he didn’t stop making history there.

In March of 2019, Gonzalez unveiled his signature reform package, Justice 2020, which he pitched as a “new national model of a progressive prosecutor’s office.”

The program includes 17 initiatives in all. Among them: creating more alternatives to incarceration through community-based organizations and otherwise considering non-jail resolutions at every juncture of a criminal case; establishing early release as the default position in most parole proceedings; and establishing new protocols for investigating police misconduct.

“I’ve tried to redefine the role of a prosecutor, and I’ve tried to have cultural change in the district attorney’s office,” Gonzalez told City and State at the time.

Case in point: In his first term, Gonzalez ceased trying low-level pot offenses and backed discovery reform. He also dismissed 90 drug convictions tainted by a corrupt police detective, and he demanded changes to state bail reform laws.

But by the start of his second term earlier this year, shootings were on the uptick in the borough — and so were criticisms from the right — and the public had gotten increasingly anxious about public safety.

These are tough times for a self-described progressive prosecutor.

Gonzalez is as Brooklyn as it gets. Raised in Bushwick and East New York when both were synonymous with drugs and violence, he attended I.S. 318 on the border of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg, and then John Dewey High School in Gravesend. He enrolled in Cornell University and then the University of Michigan Law School. He started working at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office in 1995, where he has been ever since — gradually rising through the ranks. He lives less than a mile from where he grew up with his wife and three sons in Williamsburg.

“To me, being progressive is not simply about not prosecuting cases,” Gonzalez told The New York Times earlier this year. “It’s about using the resources to protect communities.”

Shahana Hanif was politicized early in life. The child of Bangladeshi immigrants, Hanif was just 10 years old on September 11 and came of age during a time of increased daily discrimination against people who looked like her.

“The Brooklyn I know is [when I was] 10 years old, 9/11 happens and literally living the rest of the years to come with this fire to make a better democracy,” Hanif told Brooklyn Magazine. “Of course when I’m 10 I wasn’t able to think of the big picture, but I recognized that being Muslim meant something to many people.”

Born and raised in Kensington, where she still lives today, Hanif herself means something to a lot of people. She is the first female Muslim city council member, representing District 39, a swath of Brooklyn that is both gentrified and gentrifying. Her district includes the neighborhood where she grew up, as well as Borough Park, Windsor Terrace, Park Slope, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and the Columbia Waterfront.

Hers is a city council that is both barrier breaking and historic for its diversity: It is the first majority-female class and includes the largest contingent of Asian American members in history. She was tapped to chair the city’s immigration committee.

The goal, she says, is to “bring our community together around issues that impact working families across issues not just specific to their immigration status, but around education issues, around healthcare, domestic violence and so many other things.”

She has already been a vocal advocate for police reform, for food delivery workers — whom she is helping to organize — and for more accessibility in public spaces, including better cycling conditions.

And although she is just 31, the road to City Hall was hardly a cakewalk. At 17 she was diagnosed with the chronic autoimmune disease lupus, which disproportionately affects Black and brown women, and would over time galvanize her to become interested in community infrastructure and organizing. For example, Hanif belongs to the Bangladeshi Feminist Collective, a group engaged in dialogue around Bangladeshi feminist movements and advocacy for women in her community.

“I always wanted to leave Brooklyn,” Hanif said in January, when she was a guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “I always wanted to leave because the neighborhood did not have me in mind around our park spaces, around our open spaces, no youth centers, after-school programming that would get slashed annually … Lupus did that. Lupus was like, ‘Your ass is sitting right here. You’re not going anywhere.’”

And as long as she’s here, she seems intent on making a difference to her community.

In January 2019, the Brooklyn Nets made a video to promote Joe Harris, who was being considered for inclusion in that year’s NBA three-point shooting contest. It showed him demonstrating his shooting prowess — in humorous fashion — throughout his day-to-day life: He shot his clothes into a laundry basket, a couple of eggs into a frying pan and some oranges into a shopping cart in a market. In the middle of the montage, he ordered some food from an empanada truck near the Barclays Center. The message: This Joe is just a regular Joe.

Harris would go on to win the three-point contest and establish himself as one of the best sharpshooters in the game. But he was already a fan favorite — in part because of his hustle and skills on the court, and in part because of his wholehearted embrace of living in Brooklyn.

For several years now, Harris has been known as the Net who rides the subway to practice with a backpack. The New York Times called him an “accidental hipster” who blends into local coffee shops with a beanie and facial hair.

He represents the ethos of a scrappy team that steadily rose from the doldrums to the talk of the league. Even after the roster became packed with big-name superstars like Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, and after he scored himself a four-year, $72 million contract, Harris has stayed grounded in Brooklyn. Just before this past season, he gave Grub Street an eating diary for a typical week in the borough — name-checking restaurants in Prospect Heights (Prospect Butcher Co.), Boerum Hill (Rucola), Park Slope (Miriam) and Clinton Hill (Mekelburg’s).

It’s rare for a marquee professional to be seen walking around a big city neighborhood so often. But not all athletes get to live on Vanderbilt Ave., where, in his words, “It’s not hard to eat at a new spot every night.”

Abstract forms tell stories in the creations of Ukrainian-American artist Maya Hayuk, a studio painter and public artist working predominantly in acrylic, Flashe and massive-scale murals. The daughter of two university professors, she spent her childhood traveling America, Europe and Africa — experiences that exposed her to a vast range of aesthetic perspectives.

Hayuk has exhibited her artwork at the Hammer Museum in L.A., painted the iconic Bowery Wall on Houston Street in Manhattan and worked with musicians and bands including Rye Rye/M.I.A, TV on the Radio and the Flaming Lips.

Hayuk believes her studio- and public-art practices inform each other. Accordingly, her artworks across disciplines speak to the prevalence of patterns and interconnectivity, combining traditional and contemporary elements into, per her website, “new harmonic, dissonant, optimistic, experimental compositions” that balance colorful chaos with complete symmetry for absolutely mesmerizing patterns. Imagine hypnosis that doesn’t make you sleepy, but feels like a double-shot espresso.

“Hayuk’s murals draw influence from the former Soviet Union with tight and intricate patterns inspired from Ukrainian Easter eggs,” the street-art encyclopedia StreetArtBio notes. “One can also find inspiration from Mexican woven blankets, mandalas, Rorschach tests and holograms in her work.”

Last summer, Hayuk answered a few questions for a research project about how street artists make travel choices in their practices. She remarked, “It’s an honor to be invited to new places where I feel like an ambassador for Americans, women, artists, freaks, etc. I know I am not the typical New Yorker, because there actually is no such thing. I like breaking down these myths and stereotypes and discovering how much we all have in common.”

Elyssa Heller’s grocery store in Williamsburg, called Edith’s, doubles as a classic Jewish deli and appetizing counter — and triples as a full-service restaurant.

In fact, the current Edith’s mini-empire, which Heller started during the early pandemic as a pop-up at Paulie Gee’s and today also includes one of Brooklyn’s best sandwich shops — also called Edith’s — was inspired by her wanderings through Zabar’s when she first moved to Brooklyn from Chicago 10 years ago.

“If I’m stressed, I go to the grocery store and walk around like a crazy person,” Heller told Brooklyn Magazine earlier this year. “And Zabar’s was just so overwhelming. Such an amazing experience. And I thought that there was an opportunity to bring more of the global Jewish story to light, like they do in Zabar’s, through food. I always say ‘more is more,’ and I wanted to capture that wonderful spirit and give people my version of it with Edith’s.”

Anyone who’s pored over Heller’s personally curated selection of groceries, all reflecting and celebrating the Jewish diaspora, knows that she’s succeeded. Especially if Heller is around and starts telling you stories about every single item on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Plus, the food served at the eatery part of the operation is excellent, and Heller has managed to create a comfortable, welcoming gathering space amid all the groceries.

And while Heller’s attachment to her native Chicago remains undiminished — the menu from the Jewish deli of her youth, Evanston’s Barnum and Bagel, is prominently displayed — she has made Brooklyn her home. The name Edith’s has deep roots in the county of Kings, too; the whole operation is named after Heller’s great-aunt, who owned a Jewish deli in Brooklyn in the early 1950s. “It was called Tony’s,” Heller said, “because she got it from a guy named Tony and she didn’t want to change the name.”

As far as Brooklyn musicians go, they don’t get much more formidable than “Moist” Paula Henderson, a baritone saxophone player who has performed with the likes of The Roots, Amanda Palmer, TV on the Radio, Reverend Vince Anderson and Melvin Van Peebles wid Laxative.

Let’s start with the nickname, which comes from the fact that Henderson was the co-leader of Moisturizer, the legendary downtown punk-dance sax-bass-drums trio that made a name for itself across underground local artistic circles well over a decade ago.

Since the disbandment of the group, Henderson has been developing her unique style and bringing clout to the bari-sax game as a whole. “Most of the music I write is instrumental music, and I think philosophically it’s a form of passing on a story which can be interpreted by the listener to be whatever they want, so it’s more of a two-way creative process,” she has said. “Listening to instrumental music captures my imagination in a way that’s unique for me rather than being limited by a story that might be in lyrics, although I love songs with great or relatable lyrics and even many whose lyrics are completely unrelatable or even improper.”

But music is only one part of the Henderson puzzle. The artist is also an astrologer who has been hooked on the subject since taking her first course back in 2000. She has since combined her two passions of astrology and music by creating Zodiac Soundtracks, through which she curates playlists inspired by a client’s astrological sign, among other services.

Kemi Ilesanmi never seemed destined to run an arts organization. Despite having grown up in Lagos, Nigeria, among a family of artists, she is not an artist herself, nor does she hold an arts degree. In fact, she didn’t even complete her undergraduate studies at Smith College until she was in her late 20s.

When she was working on her thesis there, a professor suggested she apply for an internship at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. Despite her never having heard of the world-class institution, Ilesanmi’s one-year gig would turn into a six-year stay, with her ultimately running the Walker’s visual arts residency program.

Working there with artist Nari Ward, among others, Ilesanmi would explore notions of home in different communities, especially among those marginalized.

“He was interested in the history of highways and how they cut into neighborhoods,” Ilesanmi told Artsy about Ward, “much like Longwood was affected and dismantled by the Bruckner Expressway here in New York.” Seeing the connection between community, art, home and culture helped crystallize a perspective that she brought with her to New York in 2004 as director of grants at Creative Capital.

Since 2012, she has run the Laundromat Project (LP), where Ilesanmi straddles the line between administrator and innovator — she’s more of a people curator than an arts curator.

“What we really do is we build, we nourish, and we equip people to be community leaders and use their full creative arsenal to envision and make the world that they deserve and want to live in,” she told Artsy. To date, the Laundromat Project has commissioned and trained upward of 200 multiracial, multigenerational and multidisciplinary local artists in making art that tackles issues including gentrification, immigration, climate change, LGBTQIA safety, and food justice.

The Laundromat Project is the brainchild of Risë Wilson, who dreamt it up while attending graduate school at New York University and living in Bed-Stuy. Her idea was to own and operate a functioning neighborhood laundromat that doubled as a neighborhood hub for the arts. Through the residency program Create Change, the Laundromat Project provides resources and financial support for primarily BIPOC New York City artists to make public projects in their local laundromats and other public spaces throughout the city such as libraries, community gardens, public plazas and cultural organizations.

Under Ilesanmi’s leadership, the Laundromat Project signed its first-ever long-term lease in Bed-Stuy in mid-March 2020, unifying the LP’s activities under the same roof for the first time since its inception 15 years earlier.

“We’re really interested in artists as neighbors, artists as citizens, artists as community members,” she told the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in April. “Artists are translators and bridge-builders … Allowing arts to be recognized and valued for all the fullness that they bring to the conversation and that they bring to neighborhoods is a big part of what we’re trying to address. And that becomes part of community development.”

In February 2021, author and multimedia journalist Jamal Jordan announced his upcoming debut photography book, ”Queer Love in Color.” Based on Jordan’s impactful 2018 article in The New York Times of the same title, “Queer Love in Color” is “a celebration of the joy and romance that queer couples and families of color share,” said Jordan.

For the introduction to “Queer Love in Color,” Jordan poignantly wove together his outlook on representation and love as a Black gay man, insights from social and sexual orientation scholars, and heartfelt comments from the book’s featured subjects. The result is a cocktail that both eases, through affirmations of feelings felt, and disturbs, by prompting acknowledgement that a book like this is still needed in 2022.

Featured subject “Thomas” is quoted saying, “I think it would’ve been important for me, as a child, to see things that told me: You exist in this world. You don’t have to hide yourself. You can be authentically, 100 percent yourself and aspire to what you want and find love and live your life unapologetically and unashamed.” While these affirmations may not come regularly, or at all, from the media, Jordan has created a tangible record of queer people of color in love. He’s told their stories in totality with respect, grace and adoration, challenging and evolving the image of what it means to be queer and in love.

A gift to his younger self — who once asked, “Why do no gay people look like me?” — “Queer Love in Color” is now available for purchase and currently gracing coffee tables and shelves across Brooklyn, where Jordan has called home for eight years.

Zoë Kanan is a baking phenom who’s igniting Brooklyn tastebuds with her pop-up bagel project at Prospect Heights’ KIT (Keep in Touch). Follow along on Instagram for the latest drops. We’ll wait. Pop-ups are all the rage (still!), but Kanan’s elite restaurant resume runs deep.

The cheerful, outgoing, yet focused prodigy was raised in Houston, Texas, by a respected BBQ pitmaster father and picked up a passion for challah and babka from her Jewish grandmother. This, coupled with a fierce work ethic and an unrelenting passion for food, drew Kanan to culinary school and New York City.

By age 24, Kanan could boast of stints at Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar, Four & Twenty Blackbirds, Vaucluse and Sadelle’s, under famed pastry chef Melissa Weller. Her next move was to serve as head baker for Freehand Hotel (a position created specifically for her). By creating menu items such as chocolate halva pie and rhubarb Persian love cake, Kanan put the hotel’s sweets offerings on the map.

Ask anyone who has worked with Kanan and they’ll tell you her ascension to the top is a fait accompli. In a 2019 interview for Eater that named Kanan an Eater Young Gun, Milk Bar’s Tosi said, “She’ll do whatever the hell she wants to do, whether the world is ready for it or not.”

When Brooklyn Magazine spoke with Steve Keene on a recent Tuesday, it was on the early side, around 9:30 a.m. Keene — a painter who, in his understated fashion, describes himself as a morning person — had already been up for five hours. He had a dog to walk, he explained. But he also had work to do: He was in the middle of sending 16 orders out, having created 120 paintings in the previous three days alone.

If you’re someone who placed one of those orders, know that he is sorry about the delay. “I feel bad about that because I’ve gotten a lot of press this year,” he said. “Normally I get them out in a couple weeks, but there’s like a five-month waiting list.”

About that press attention: Earlier this year, Tractor Beam and Hat & Beard Press announced a plan to publish “The Steve Keene Art Book,” produced by photographer Daniel Efram, on June 14. The Kickstarter-funded 265-page book is the first art book to exclusively profile Keene, who is arguably one of most prolific American artists.

“I went to art school. I did everything right. Nothing really turned me on until I started doing everything wrong. Until I started giving everything away,” he said, also name-checking Americana painter- predecessors Morris Katz and Howard Finster as inspiration. “I like folk art. I like stuff that comes from the ground.”

That “art school” he went to was Yale, where he got an MFA. These days he buys 400 thin sheets of plywood a year as his canvases and cuts them into eight squares each. He creates, by his estimate, a quarter mile of art a year. He’s sold or given away well north of 300,000 of his paintings, of which he usually creates multiples at a time — slapdash yet distinctive.

“I kind of started this as a stunt, in a way. It’s like, ‘OK, you’re not particularly interested in my painting? You’ll never be able to look away. They’ll be everywhere!’” said Keene, who lives in Greenpoint, where he paints in a studio he calls “the cage.” “It gave me energy. It made me feel punk. ‘I’m gonna kill you with my art!’”

If you live in the borough, you’ve probably seen his work in bars, music venues, coffee shops. You may have a friend who has a Steve Keene original. Maybe you have one yourself. If not, you could pick one up for around $5, which is less than the coffee table book about him that will cost ($95) when it comes out. It is less, even, than what you would pay for one of the records by his friends in Pavement or the Silver Jews — whose albums, including “Wowie Zowie” and “The Arizona Record,” feature his art as covers.

“I’m uncomfortable seeing one of my paintings. I like seeing 140 of them all together,” he said. “If you’re any kind of creative person, it’s terrible to overthink it because it can wreck anything good that might come up. It took me most of my life to try to not overthink what I’m doing. I try my best, but I don’t worry about whether it’s good or bad. That’s why if I paint 100 pictures in a day, it’s like, ‘OK, they’re not great, but at least I did 100 of them.’”

In 2009, Greenpoint resident James Kim was asked to DJ a school dance at the Lavelle School for the Blind. Little did he know the event would inspire the next decade of his life.

Kim saw firsthand the power of music flowing through these kids and immediately wanted to use his knowledge and skills as a DJ and event marketer to bring world-renowned beatboxers such as Taylor McFerrin together to make a real difference. It’s 2022, and BEAT (Bridging Education and Art Together), the nonprofit he started to empower the visually impaired with beatboxing, is entering its second decade.

“With beatboxing, students don’t need instruments or sheet music,” Kim told Slate. “They’re learning how to be music.”

In a YouTube video sponsored by Nokia Bell Labs, footage shows students beatboxing and having the time of their lives. Everyone in the room is beaming with excitement and wonder.

This year BEAT will launch an app called Alphabeat (currently in beta testing) that will use beatboxing as an alternative to traditional speech language therapy.

Kim’s passion for and devotion to the community through the arts has led him to co-produce R-16, a South Korean b-boy competition. He is also the emcee of King of the Wing, the Caribbean’s largest food festival, which benefits the Virgin Islands Children’s Museum.

After earning an undergraduate degree in sociology from Chestnut Hill College in Philly, Christa Lynch went on to earn a law degree from NYU School of Law and a master’s degree in international finance from Columbia University before embarking on a successful decade-plus run in the banking and trading sector.

Feeling burned-out and unfulfilled, she then traded in her white collar for a white apron as a sous chef at Google’s New York headquarters in Chelsea — and in 2017 founded her own farm-to-table catering, hospitality and event production company called Brooklyn Braised.

“Within six months of my first job after graduate school, I started to feel like I was pushing myself towards looking good on paper,” she said in an interview on Medium. “But it didn’t mean that I was good at what I was doing or that the work made me happy.”

Today, Brooklyn Braised — which caters special occasions, company events and home delivery with seasonal menus, cocktails, vegan options and more — sources local Black- and brown- owned vendors and hires formerly incarcerated people.

During the pandemic, Lynch started Meals on Us to partner with shelters and hunger- relief organizations including Camba and the Kensington Family Shelter to provide families with thousands of healthy meals. For that work, Lynch received a special citation from then-Borough President Eric Adams and received a “Woman of Courage” award from Serena Williams and Bumble.

“What Christa is doing is just so empowering and selfless,” Williams said at the time. “She recognized a problem in her own community and didn’t wait for anyone to take action.”

Joel Mahfood has lived in New York for less than a decade but has managed to make a major mark on Brooklyn. As the owner of four businesses — two Natty Garden plant stores, Natty Pet Shop and Mahfood Market — he has created a mini empire that nourishes body, soul and community.

Mahfood, 40, grew up in Jamaica but traveled to New York to spend summers with his mother. At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Mahfood decided he wanted to work for himself and opened a small plant shop on Washington Avenue and Dean Street in Prospect Heights, despite having no formal horticultural training. He called the store Natty Garden — an homage to his Caribbean roots and Rastafarian beliefs — and cultivated a welcoming, well-priced and joyful atmosphere.

He started growing his locs out, and people began referring to Mahfood as Natty. “Natty is just a term for freedom,” Mahfood told the blog Shades of Commerce. “He’s a little different. So Natty Garden is where Natty Dread hang around. We try to bring that vibe, ya know.”

In the years since, Natty Garden has expanded its footprint and product offerings, even hosting the occasional reggae party in its outdoor garden space (Mahfood is a percussionist and Natty Garden parties often feature living legends such as percussionist Larry McDonald and singer Milton Henry). Mahfood opened a second location on Marcus Garvey Blvd. in Bed-Stuy in 2019, a move he described as “like being a part of history.”

“I’m also extremely proud of the community that has formed around Natty Garden. My customers know me by name and have supported me through the pandemic, and we’ve grown together through our love of plants,” he told the blog Triple Mint. “And that’s the beauty of Prospect Heights and Marcus Garvey, it’s a community that will support you, through the good times and the bad.”

Ever industrious, Mahfood branched out from plants and opened Natty Pet Shop just around the corner from his Prospect Heights shop.

In New York, coffee shops are as ubiquitous as Chase Banks and Duane Reades. So, starting a coffee chain from scratch isn’t without its challenges, considering there are about 3,000 java joints here, according to at least one estimate.

Enter Blank Street Coffee, a Brooklyn-born company that has grown from a single coffee cart in Williamsburg to 30 locations dotted across the city. Cofounders Vinay Menda and Issam Freiha have a simple blueprint: Sell cheap, high-quality coffee using a cost-efficient model.

The duo, both immigrants in their twenties, met through mutual friends in college. Menda moved here from Dubai and attended New York University; Freiha, born in Beirut and raised in London, attended Columbia. Before Blank Street, the pair started a venture fund out of their dorm rooms that would become Reshape Ventures and invested in companies including Sweetgreen, lodging company Sonder, and Reddit.

In 2019, Menda and Freiha wanted to hang a shingle of their own. Blank Street was born after Menda and Freiha surveyed friends about their coffee-drinking habits. Turns out, people hate overpaying for coffee.

“What we kept hearing was, ‘I would rather have La Colombe or Blue Bottle but I end up going to Starbucks because it’s right there — and the app is good,” Menda told Grub Street last year. “These third-wave brands are too expensive over time. So how could we take these high- quality products and make them more convenient and cheaper?”

Customers aren’t greeted with an overwhelming menu and the shops don’t have dozens of tables to work from. Rather, the Blank Street model is to operate from small spaces, such as mobile carts or brick-and-mortar spots where they split the rent with other businesses. In Park Slope, Blank Street is tucked away in a store that also sells plants.

Prices are noticeably cheaper compared to the big chains that dominate the city. “We’re about 25 percent to 35 percent cheaper than Starbucks on espresso,” Menda recently told Bloomberg. The secret? Buying local beans and using state-of-the-art coffee- making machines that cut down on labor costs, all while paying baristas about $27 an hour with tips.

Blank Street raised more than $60 million from venture capitalists last year with plans to use the money for global domination. This year, the company aims to have 100 locations in New York City and will open its first in London, which Freiha says will be its second-biggest market.

Menda also hopes Blank Street can help immigrant street vendors in the future. “If you could help them get a stable income and level up in the economy — which is why they came here in the first place — that’s the main thing,” he said. “So we’ll try all the models, and what works best, we’ll scale.”

Philly-born and based in Bed-Stuy, Sade Mims began making her own bags and jewelry over a decade ago while studying at the Art Institute in Manhattan. She always harbored dreams of becoming an entrepreneur — “I used to say, ‘I’m going to be the Black Martha Stewart,’” she told Architectural Digest earlier this year — but couldn’t have guessed success would come so swiftly.

Almost immediately after founding her sustainable accessories brand, Edas (her first name spelled backward), in 2013, her eclectic wares went viral online. They’ve been worn by actors including Tessa Thompson and Laura Harrier, and they’re sold at Saks.

“Edas is a celebration of women and it’s an ode to the women that raised me and the women that brought me here, and have really paved the way in terms of my inspiration, but also just showing me that all things are possible and all things are tangible,” she told Hypebae last year.

Taking cues from nature’s lush colors and leaning into 1970s aesthetics, Mims crafts everything from groovy clutches to geometric earrings and brass-wire chokers to beaded bucket hats (made in collaboration with Cameron Tea) and handbags that evoke classic style with a decidedly 2022 twist. Recent trips to the Caribbean and Mexico have also influenced her designs.

“If I saw Chaka Khan in my stuff, I would flip,” she told W magazine. “I’m honored and I’m excited and geeked up about everything that has come my way and everything that has happened. But Chaka Khan? That would take my breath away.”

Recently, she’s branched into furniture and plans to get into shoes. At her newish brick-and-mortar showroom in Williamsburg, one standout piece is a table that she collaborated on with a woodworker friend and that got her a shout-out in Architectural Digest. “I want to build a brand that’s multidimensional, where I get to express all of the creative things that feel important to me,” she told the magazine. “The furniture part is just an extension of that. So, starting it in my own space was like, ‘Why the fuck not?’”

Diana Mora is best known to the borough as half of the team behind Crown Heights hotspot Friends and Lovers, which is “dedicated to curating moments where musicians, DJs and life-lovers come together and celebrate as one.”

The opening of Friends and Lovers in November 2013 helped transform Crown Heights, hooking area hipsters back into their own locale and away from Friday night sojourns to then-trendier Williamsburg. With Mora refusing to settle for only weekends, Friends and Lovers set out to become Crown Heights’ first haunt with live entertainment every night of the week. It certainly helped that Mora is a professional communicator who has worked to devise solutions in cutting-edge categories like cannabis, having led digital marketing communications and social impact initiatives in her freelance work for brands like Aspen-based CBD company Toast.

As the pandemic took hold of Brooklyn’s nightlife scene, Mora translated her knack for creative problem-solving into community-based solutions. In March 2020, for instance, she founded NYC Nightlife United, an advocacy and action coalition created by and for the city’s nightlife community in response to the Covid crisis.

Rolling Stone and other outlets reported on the NYC Nightlife United Sessions Vol. 1, a series of digital concerts spearheaded by NYC Nightlife United and featuring local acts like Monday Blue, Scienze and Brass Queens — all airing live from Friends and Lovers to raise funds for shuttered music venues and other nightlife locations left to languish with little help from the city or state government.

Here in the new normal, Friends and Lovers is back up and running with weekly events ranging from comedy to music and a little magic.

One fateful Christmas morning a few years back, dancer Penda N’diaye unwrapped an unconventional gift from her mother: her first- ever vibrator. The gift gave N’diaye a jolt in more ways than one, spurring her to examine her own sexual education and ultimately leading her to create sex-positive platform Pro Hoe in 2018. The mission: “Decolonize pleasure.”

“My mom wished she had spoken to her kids about sex when we were at a much younger age,” N’diaye explained in an interview with GOOP. “I started dialing back, thinking: Well, I learned about sex from my friends, porn, the media, television — basically every outlet except from my parents or from other Black peers or mentors.”

Pro Hoe strives to “eradicate stigmas surrounding sexual freedom and identity in Black communities,” with a focus on “using sex and taboo as a means of political change and resistance.” N’diaye leads forums sponsored by Planned Parenthood, sex therapists and social workers. In the process, she’s harnessing her stage presence, which she honed by studying dance at NYU and touring internationally alongside contemporaries like musician Robert Glasper.

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s writings on pleasure as revolution, N’diaye sees sensuality as the foundation for greater power. “I find, a lot of times, that sensuality carries over to the rest of your life,” she elaborated in another interview with underwear company CUUP. “Sensuality is when you go to a party, love the way you look, feel confident and make eye contact with people as you work a room.”

N’diaye writes for VICE and Refinery29 and hosts her own Pro Hoe podcast, which speaks with “creatives on sex and sexual identities while answering anonymous sex and dating questions from listeners.” She’s also releasing a book with menstrual underwear brand Thinx and is planning a collab with a sex toy company, coming soon, bringing it all full circle.

In 2019, veteran journalist Mosheh Oinounou was an executive producer on “CBS Evening News,” a powerful job earned after years of working at other networks including Fox News and Bloomberg TV. In 2020, he went out on his own, but not to another TV channel. Instead, he pivoted to Instagram to help pioneer a new prototype of news service.

“Instagram felt like a place for a clean, fresh start,” he said at the time.

Oinounou (pronounced Wah-nu-nu) clearly thought it through: The Covid pandemic supercharged social media usage by both keeping people inside and on their devices and by creating a desire for easily understandable public health information on the virus (think charts, numbers and other simple graphics.) And the racial justice movement that swelled after the murder of George Floyd added fuel to the fire as imagery from rallies and protest symbols spread across Instagram.

He summarizes the day’s most important news on his Mo News account, curating a series of article screenshots in his Stories from the likes of The New York Times and other top outlets. Many of the images have his commentary typed in, with Oinounou breaking down the complexities of international relations, D.C. politics and more.

He does it pretty well, judging by his 242,000 followers, the newshounds who have followed in his footsteps and the attention the industry is paying him. And he expanded his offerings this year, writing weekly newsletters through Meta’s new Bulletin platform, designed to compete with Substack.

Joseph Patel has had more than just one summer of soul. The Oscar- and Grammy-winning producer for the music documentary “Summer of Soul,” directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, began his road to the red carpet all the way back in 1996.

That’s when Patel, then a Bay Area music journalist and radio host, penned The Roots’ first cover story for Rap Pages. “I get flown to Philadelphia for the interview. I met Ahmir and it was like he was one of us. He was a music nerd. We just became friends,” Patel told GQ India. “Next thing I know, we’re in his messy room in this house in South Philly where 20 people live and he’s playing me a four-hour jam session that’s just him and D’Angelo, recorded the first day they met.”

Patel’s friendship with The Roots’ drummer grew, and in the intervening years, he built a variety of media bona fides. Now in Brooklyn, Patel has worked as a producer, director, writer and executive for Vevo, Vice, The Fader and MTV, where he created and directed the regional hip-hop docuseries “My Block” and oversaw the network’s 2008 presidential election coverage. Today Patel is most associated with a certain documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival, a multi-week musical showcase in 1969 colloquially referred to as the Black Woodstock. The festival was attended by approximately 300,000 people and featured Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, and Stevie Wonder. But its memory (and footage) remained locked away for over 50 years. That is, until Questlove learned about it.

Backstage at “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” Patel recalls being asked by Questlove to oversee a documentary about the festival. Patel was mostly curious how the multi-hyphenate would actually fit directing into his busy schedule. “I asked him straight up: ’Why do you want to do this?’ He convinced me to go on this journey with him,” Patel told LEVEL. “It wasn’t my story to tell; it really was Ahmir’s. Ahmir sees things that other people in the room don’t … He knew what story he wanted to tell. It was my job as a producer to help him tell it.”

The resulting documentary — which won an Academy Award for Best Music Film, as well as two top prizes at Sundance and the Grammy for Best Music Film — showcases a variety of performers against one of the most turbulent and transformative periods of American history. Crucially, the documentary uses the festival to contextualize Black life through a distinctly Black lens — a perspective that was immeasurably enhanced by Patel’s journalistic experience, music- nerd background and close working relationship with the visionary Questlove.

Brooklyn has entered the metaverse.

To be more specific, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce has entered the metaverse. Seoul, South Korea, was by some accounts the first city to establish a virtual communication ecosystem in the so-called metaverse on January 1. But Brooklyn wasn’t far behind. Randy Peers, the president and CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, signed an international memorandum of understanding with his counterpart in Seoul days later via an Oculus VR headset. Or rather, his avatar did.

“It was extraordinary,” Peers told Brooklyn Magazine. “I had to practice the day before, because when you put the Oculus on, you have this natural tendency to want to actually physically move, so you want to walk. But you’re in a room and you can bang into desks and stuff like that.”

This, clearly, is not your grandfather’s chamber. And Peers, a lifelong Brooklynite who grew up in Canarsie and lives in Marine Park, will be the first to tell you as much.

“Brooklyn when I was growing up — ’70s, ’80s, partially through the ’90s — was a typical story of an old manufacturing city in decline,” he said. “Just after 9/11 was this definitive time when Brooklyn started to turn a corner and march towards this progression of being the hippest, most happening place on the planet.”

It helped, he said, that the borough “had an identified brand. It was a negative brand at the time, but people knew what Brooklyn was. You have to convince people what was once dangerous became edgy and then ultimately became hip.”

In the post-9/11 era, the borough was able to attract development through real estate conversions (of occasionally questionable legal status, perhaps, but that’s a topic for another time). Toward the end of 2019, just months ahead of the pandemic, Peers took on the mantle of chamber leadership with the goal of modernizing the body. “Covid hit and there was no playbook for that, but we were able to really kick into action rather quickly and start to reimagine what our value proposition was throughout the crisis,” he said.

That expression, “value proposition,” is an interesting one. What is the role of a century-old chamber of commerce in 2022? Peers himself admits the whole idea of such an organization has a musty feel to it. “You ask a millennial: ‘Tell us about a chamber of commerce,’ they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, my grandfather worked in finance for 30 years and when he retired, the chamber had a dinner and gave him a watch,’” he said. “All chambers do three basic things: promotion, support and advocacy.” Today, the core directive remains, though there is new technology to be leveraged in creative ways. (Hence, the metaverse.)

The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, a certified Community Development Financial Institution, or CDFI, has also gotten into lending on Peers’ watch. One upshot of the pandemic, he said, has been the ability to grow that CDFI and, as of this writing, dole out nearly $600,000 in microloans. The chamber has also facilitated more than $6 million in lending through partners.

“We never had two nickels to lend before 2020,” he said.

Devin Person is a wizard. Literally. He wears a gown, has a long gray beard, a pointy hat, casts spells, grants wishes and, according to his website, seems to have succumbed to one of the world’s most sinister spells: the one that makes someone start a podcast.

The son of a physicist and a social worker, Person grew up in Massachusetts, attended a non-wizard college and holds a day job in tech. When not working to pay bills, Person rides around on the subway granting free wishes. He also offers $150 life-coaching sessions in his Brooklyn apartment (Gandalf of Greenpoint, have times really gotten that hard in the Shire?).

Person embraces the silliness of it all — while also embracing his niche. “What I’m offering is a moment to … think about things differently,” he said in a New York Post profile. “Maybe [the person will] take an action that they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

The Masbia soup kitchen network, which has locations in Boro Park and Flatbush in Brooklyn and Rego Park in Queens, is unique in several ways: Its outposts are set up like restaurants, complete with menus and volunteer waiters. A decent amount of the food is procured from farmers markets and community supported agriculture, or CSA, organizations. And the kitchens offer take-home packages with enough food to help families in need get through an entire week.

And because it was founded in 2005 by two Orthodox Jews, its food is also all kosher.

Alexander Rapaport, Masbia’s executive director and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, is the soup kitchen’s public face; he’s constantly talking to the press about the organization’s initiatives. Masbia has for years reached out to help in the face of crises well beyond Brooklyn — a borough that was itself hungry for relief even before the Covid-19 pandemic, which greatly exacerbated income and food insecurity.

After the Bronx fire that killed 17 in January, Rapaport and Masbia volunteers donated food to some who escaped the blaze — and also helped them buy new clothes and toiletries at Target. After deadly tornadoes killed dozens and left many more without power in Kentucky last winter, Rapaport and his team traveled to the scene with food. And in the fall, they showed up in New Jersey to bring nourishment to Afghan refugees.

Back home in Brooklyn, Masbia serves thousands of dinners per week at each soup kitchen location and over a million per year in total. The take-home packages alone account for about 50,000 pounds of food each week.

As Rapaport said in the wake of the Bronx fire, the work of Masbia — which in Hebrew means “to satiate” — is about more than feeding people.

“America is a mosaic of goodness, people coming together all the time and trying to make it whole for the people who are broken,” he said. “That’s all that we try to do.”

Hair style is a key part of expressing one’s gender identity. But precious few establishments in Brooklyn — and New York City overall — offer gender-neutral spaces to get a haircut.

As Magda Ryczko explains, there are traditional “salons,” which most people label as feminine, that focus on “long hair and color.” On the other end of the spectrum, there are, in her words, “hypermasculine” barber shops that “often have a stiff and inaccessible vibe, especially for queer and trans folx.” (The Dress Code Project, which provides inclusive barbershop training around the world, says that over 90 percent of LGBTQ+ customers have been misgendered during a haircut.)

So in 2011, after working at different barber shops in Williamsburg, Ryczko, who identifies as a lesbian, decided to open her own shop in the area. It had only enough chairs for two clients at a time, but the demand came pretty quickly. She now presides over a mini-chain of locations — another in East Williamsburg, one in Manhattan and one in Los Angeles, co- owned by a former employee — and has her own line of hair products sold at her locations, all under the Hairrari name.

Today there is a growing movement of queer-friendly barbershops opening across the borough, but Ryczko is seen as a pioneer. All Hairrari employees display their pronouns prominently in their work spaces and get training on pronoun sensitivity.

Hairrari also tries to offer free cuts to those who can’t afford them.

“It’s not just work. It’s a responsibility to be present, be there for people, and inspire people [so] that they can be themselves,” Ryczko told Popsugar.

If you’re plugged into the borough’s indie music world, there’s a good chance you’ve come into contact with some aspect of Brandon Stosuy’s work.

There are various concrete labels that fit Stosuy, including: former managing editor of Pitchfork; cofounder and editor-in-chief of The Creative Independent, a site of interviews with well-known artists; cofounder of the Zone 6 musician management company; cofounder of Basilica Soundscape, a festival of avant-garde music and art held annually in a former 19th-century factory in Hudson, New York; music curator for MoMA PS1, the Broad museum in Los Angeles and the indie venue TV Eye in Ridgewood; and author of multiple books on the creative process, such as “Make Time for Creativity: Finding Space for Your Most Meaningful Work.”

Growing up in southern New Jersey, Stosuy first gravitated to hardcore and metal music, and started booking live shows starting at age 13. But over the course of his time at Pitchfork, he became known for his reviews — on everything from pop nymph Grimes to “lighter” metal group Deafheaven to the instrumental post-rock band Explosions in the Sky — which still reverberate across the internet today.

In Stosuy’s post-Pitchfork years, the Basilica festival has become one of the country’s most innovative, known for its ambient music sessions that invite attendees to lie flat on the factory floor to take everything in (think Burning Man-meets-Bushwick) — though the offerings can also swing from punishing punk to book readings. And he has grown The Creative Independent into a substantial online archive that equates to a holy grail for up-and-coming musicians, writers and artists.

Bicycling has enjoyed a huge boom in popularity in New York during the pandemic — to the tune of a 33 percent increase, according to the city’s Department of Transportation.

But the influx of new riders has revealed some of the bigger stresses on the transportation system: If you bike around the city at all — for errands, commuting, exercise — you’ve probably noticed that it’s hard to find a safe place to store your bike. And that’s after you’ve dealt with the morass of shoddy or unsafe bike lanes, the lack of cohesive cycling infrastructure throughout the city, and a Wild West of e-bikes, scooters and general hostility toward anything on two wheels.

“The problem we have right now is that we have a city and we have city streets that are largely designed for cars,” Shabazz Stuart, CEO of the bike parking start-up Oonee, told Brooklyn Magazine earlier this year. “If people feel the streets aren’t made for them as users, you will always feel like a guest on a roadway.”

Oonee, which is Japanese for sea urchin, is a Brooklyn-based company looking to address some of these issues. In December, the start-up unveiled a bicycle parking system in Williamsburg’s Domino Park called the Oonee Mini, with secure storage for up to six bikes. The ultimate goal is to erect thousands of different- sized modular parking sheds and storage facilities throughout the five boroughs.

In March, Oonee’s Mini began a tour through the city, where it’s placed in high-volume areas for a month at a time to allow the city to gather data and determine next steps. Keep an eye out for one on Vanderbilt Avenue through June.

“If you build it, they definitely will come,” Stuart said on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “We want to create bike parking facilities citywide that allow people to use their bike to get from point A to point B, to make more bike trips possible. You can’t do that unless you have secure bike parking.”

Led by a team of Black and brown advocates, designers, and policy experts, Oonee is thinking bigger than just parking, though. Stuart and his colleagues are looking to change the dialogue around cycling in the city — and hoping to build a system that’s friendlier for cyclists, beyond just a few new bike lanes.

“The priority is changing the conversation,” said Stuart, who was the deputy director of operations at the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership prior to cofounding Oonee. “It’s dominated by white men. That’s not reflective of who actually bikes in the city: We’ve got 65,000 delivery workers … who are almost all people of color and immigrants. A majority of people who bike in New York City are non-white.”

Johnny Thornton took on the leadership role at Arts Gowanus at an inauspicious moment. It was early 2020, there was maybe $4,000 in the bank, the neighborhood was in the midst of a long and contentious transition period … and a global pandemic had just touched down.

“It was a fun time to take over an organization,” he half-joked to Brooklyn Magazine in April.

Now in its 26th year, Arts Gowanus is a nonprofit organization that supports and advocates for artists in the Gowanus area. There are currently around 400 member artists, Thornton said. The group is known for its hugely popular annual Gowanus Open Studios, which invites the public into galleries and studios for a weekend of browsing, shopping, schmoozing and entertainment.

Thornton’s job as executive director is to agitate for affordable working conditions, diversity, robust public arts programming and sustainability in the neighborhood’s arts scene. “Artists have been getting priced out of Gowanus for as long as I’ve been working there,” said Thornton on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” When developers came for Gowanus with an eye toward an historic reshaping of the area around the canal, Thornton made sure the artists had a seat at the table. Working with community leaders and local officials such as Brad Lander (then a city councilor, now the city comptroller), Thornton led the charge in negotiating a community-benefits agreement that will provide 30,000 square feet of highly subsidized studio spaces for artists as well as a community arts center in the new Gowanus.

“With any sort of deal, and as these buildings are getting built, it’s just a lot of oversight,” said Thornton.

Thornton — an artist and gallery co-owner in his own right — is perpetually on the lookout for ways to expand the Arts Gowanus footprint. When the pandemic forced Gowanus Open Studios to skip a year, Thornton organized a Covid-friendly mile- and-a-half-long art walk along Atlantic Avenue. Ten thousand stir-crazy locals came out in the middle of a pandemic to take in some art. He’s currently working on reprising it at a bigger scale this year.

In April, the group co-presented “Brooklyn Utopias: Along the Canal,” a multisite exhibition that explored what a “utopia” in Gowanus would look like. “I see art as this place that grows community and gets people from all walks of life having a conversation,” Thornton said.

Which is not to say he expects the area around the canal to turn into some kind of Shangri-La overnight.

“I’m never happy,” he said. “[In] New York City and Brooklyn, it’s very difficult to be an artist. It’s very difficult to find affordable work space. I’m always fighting for more. That’s kind of my motto: More.”

Thornton, who grew up in apartheid South Africa before moving to the United States, credits his drive to a kidney illness that left him practically bedridden for a decade. “I don’t like being bored,” he said.

Joanne Tucker made her screen debut in 2012’s gay comedy “Gayby” alongside her now-husband, Adam Driver. The pair met while studying at Juilliard and married in 2013. (If you want to see both actors when they were still wet behind the ears, they played versions of themselves in the horror short “The Basement,” still available on YouTube as of this writing.)

Tucker’s most recent roles include a part in Paul Riccio’s critically acclaimed independent film “Give or Take” and a recurring part on Showtime’s “American Rust.” She also starred in Scott Burns’ “The Report,” Alex Gibney’s “Zero Days” and Alex Ross Perry’s “Listen Up Philip.”

But when Tucker isn’t appearing in movies, she runs Arts in the Armed Forces (AITAF) with her husband.Tucker cofounded the nonprofit charity with Driver to provide high-quality theater and film programming to active- duty service members and veterans. The idea for the organization began in 2008 when Driver realized that the performing arts helped him articulate his own feelings about serving in the Marines post-9/11. AITAF’s flagship event is their annual Veterans Day performance fundraiser, usually held at the American Airlines Theater or Roundabout Theatre Company in the old Studio 54 space.

Throughout the year, Tucker and a revolving cast of professional actors volunteer to visit military bases all over the world to perform. In March of this year, for example, AITAF visited the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, which was the target of a terrorist attack in 2019. “We all have roles to play,” said one audience member whose reaction AITAF shared. “Theater allows us to take a break from those roles for a few hours.”

Baking is a scientific act, one of measurement and precision. It’s mathematical at its core. Which is what made Akim Vann, a life coach and a math tutor, the perfect person to open the cozy-chic Bakery on Bergen in Prospect Heights — a business she founded, she says, before she even knew how to bake.

Vann, a mother of four, says her fierce drive connects directly back to her parents. Her mother, who is Chinese, was a math teacher, and her late father was producer and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Teddy Vann (who cowrote “The Power of Love” by Luther Vandross and released the 1973 classic “Santa Claus is a Black Man,” featuring a 5-year-old Vann singing alongside her father). “He was an entrepreneur who worked from home, so I grew up with the notion of being autonomous,” she told Black-Owned Brooklyn in 2020.

Vann creates deliciously sweet baked goods like chocolate sablé (“a cousin to the brownie”), push pops and banana nutella cupcakes alongside savory treats including chicken empanadas, veggie dumplings and Asian guacamole with chips. “I don’t use a lot of junk,” she told Thrillist. “In Chinese cooking and the way that I grew up, we had very simple, high-quality ingredients. There weren’t hundreds of things in the pot.”

Although not all of her treats necessarily call out to her Chinese heritage, the bakery’s decor does: The red door welcoming patrons symbolizes good luck in the Asian culture.