Victor Manuel Chunga, also known as Vick, Vee, Tor, and Victor Suckabird, is a writer, scholar, certified paralegal, ASL interpreter, and professional overthinker of all things human. A Taurus born in the year of the Rabbit, Victor says that means he is “into pseudo science and self fulfilled prophecies,” which tells you almost everything you need to know: he is funny, self aware, curious, and not afraid to make a joke while standing in the middle of a very serious truth. Before prison, he was “a Twin in the making,” shadowing as a bartender and shot boy. While incarcerated, he became a certified paralegal through Blackstone, an American Sign Language interpreter for Deaf incarcerated people, earned an AA in Psychology from Ashworth College, and a BA in Sociology from Mount Saint Mary College. Next up is his master’s degree, with the end goal being a PhD, because as Victor puts it, “I WILL be Dr. Victor Chunga one day.”
Victor found writing, or maybe writing found him, in 2015 after the Clinton prison escape, when he was locked in his cell for over 20 hours a day and asked himself, “What do I have to offer the world?” Since then, he has been answering that question on the page. His nonfiction has won two PEN America awards, in 2017 and 2024, and has been featured at Black & Pink and NY Writers Coalition events. He has also published a satirical cartoon with the Prison Journalism Project, and in 2021, during the COVID pandemic, released a zombie fiction novel titled The Ones Who Survive under the pen name Victor Manuel, which he describes as Romeo and Juliet meets Orange Is the New Black set in The Walking Dead.
Victor’s work is thoughtful, strange, sharp, playful, and deeply human. He is interested in collaborating with college students, publishing research, and working with people who care about the prison population beyond pity, politics, or performance. He sees prison as many things, including “a large controlled data warehouse,” filled with stories, contradictions, patterns, and people who are usually studied from the outside but rarely listened to from within. Victor is clear about what he brings to the table: he may not be able to Google, but he knows who to talk to, how to talk to them, and how to reach people because he lives with them.
His questions are not small ones. Victor wants to study shame, pride, religion, God, murder, morality, and the uncomfortable gap between what society condemns and what it secretly consumes as entertainment. He wonders what shame means if pride is the opposite of shame, and pride comes before the fall. He asks what the god someone believes in says about them. He challenges the way society acts as if only “monsters” commit murder, while binge watching murder for entertainment and judging every killing differently depending on the story around it.
Victor is not trying to justify harm, flatten people into villains, or make clean answers out of messy lives. He is trying to understand. His voice is bold, funny, skeptical, sincere, and impossible to separate from the person behind it: a man who can talk about sociology, zombies, shame, God, prison, and self fulfilled prophecies in the same breath and somehow make it all feel connected.
Optional One Line Tagline:
Writer, scholar, Taurus Rabbit, future Dr. Chunga, and asker of the questions people usually avoid.
Halo Rain brings big Libra energy, witchy sparkle, kitchen queen precision, and the kind of humor that can turn a regular conversation into a full laugh session. She is creative, expressive, playful, and full of personality, with a love for drawing, writing, spooky shows, dramatic stories, nerdy favorites, and anything that lets imagination run a little wild. Her world has room for What We Do in the Shadows, Spartacus, Ready Player One, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Claws, Rick and Morty, and Squidbillies, which says plenty about her taste: funny, strange, bold, chaotic, and fully alive.
Halo grew up all over New York State and was a foster kid, moving often and surviving a childhood that scarred her both mentally and physically. But she tells her story with honesty, humor, and strength, never letting the hardest parts become the only parts. She says that childhood “prepared me for prison life pretty good,” a line that carries her sharp honesty and her ability to find a little light even in places that were never built to give it.
Halo is deeply into witchcraft and practices it seriously. Through shadow work, she says she has found her demons and either vanquished them or made friends with the ones she could not. “Not to say I believe in the devil,” she adds, “which I do not. All my demons were created.” That line carries the heart of her story. Halo is not pretending survival is cute or easy. She is doing the work, naming what shaped her, and turning it into power, creativity, humor, and self understanding.
She works in the facility kitchen as a Diet Cook, a detail oriented job she genuinely loves. She also draws Fly As Hell, which she says “just comes” to her after conversations and laugh sessions with her bestie Vee, where one idea turns into many. Halo is trans and currently lives in a male facility, which she describes as “hard as hell sometimes.” Still, she speaks with honesty, humor, and grace, recognizing positive changes that have been made for trans people in the New York State prison system while continuing to advocate hard for her community inside.
Halo stays positive, keeps her sense of humor close, and draws strength from the organizations and people who go hard for trans folks. She is interested in corresponding with people, or as she puts it, “if you are a person... lol hit me up!” She is spiritual, funny, resilient, community minded, wildly creative, and absolutely not boring.
Optional One Line Tagline:
Libra witch, Fly As Hell creator, kitchen queen, shadow worker, and professional laugh session survivor.
