Anastacia-Renee is an award-winning writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, TEDx Speaker and podcaster. She is the author of Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad), (v.) (Black Ocean), Forget It (Black Radish) and Here In The (Middle) of Nowhere forthcoming from HarperCollins/Amistad March 2024. Their poetry and fiction have been published widely.

Chris Abani is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. He is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize and a Guggenheim Award. His fiction includes The Secret History of Las Vegas (Penguin 2014), Song For Night *(Akashic, 2007), *The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004), and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections are Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), There Are No Names for Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), Feed Me The Sun - Collected Long Poems *(Peepal Tree Press, 2010) Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne’s Lot (Red Hen, 2003) and *Kalakuta Republic *(Saqi, 2001).

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain't Worth Much was released in 2016 and was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in fall 2017 by Two Dollar Radio. 

Aria Aber is a writer currently based in Oakland, where she serves as the Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. She is the author of Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

Helene Achanzar is a Filipina Canadian poet and educator. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Oxford American, jubilat, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor for Poetry Northwest, the Midwest chair for Kundiman, and the programs manager at the Chicago Poetry Center.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. Born in Tehran, Iran, he currently teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. 

Kemi Alabi is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022) and coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021). Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, they now live in Chicago, IL.

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. She is the author of Fighting Is Like a Wife (Coffee House Press, April 2022) and From the Inside Quietly, inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. She serves on the faculty of the Randolph College MFA program.

Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father, he is the author of 'Shapes & Disfigurements', 'To Sweeten Bitter' and 'The Perseverance'. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. Other accolades include the Ted Hughes award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year award & The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as a shortlist for the Griffin Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded 'The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize', (Judged by Ocean Vuong), for his poem 'Sound Machine'. Also in 2019, his poem ‘Jamaican British’ was added to the GCSE syllabus.

Cynthia Arrieu-King was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati. A former Kundiman Fellow, Arrieu-King is the author of the poetry chapbook The Small Anything City (2006) and the full-length poetry collections People Are Tiny in Paintings of China(2010), Manifest (2013), and FuturelessLanguages(2018). With Sophia Kartsonis, she coauthored the chapbook By Some Miracle a Year Lousy with Meteors (2013). She also cowrote the collection Unlikely Conditions (1913 Press, 2016) with the late Hillary Gravendyk. Arrieu-King is an assistant professor at Stockton University and has been a featured poet at the Dodge Poetry Festival.

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont.

Derrick Austin's debut poetry collection, Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016), was selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. A Cave Canem fellow, Austin earned his MFA from the University of Michigan where he was awarded a Hopwood Award in graduate poetry. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2015, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, New England Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Paris-American, Memorious, and other journals and anthologies. He is the Social Media Coordinator for The Offing.

Cameron Awkward-Rich, a poet and critic, is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015). A Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine, his poetry has appeared in Narrative, The Baffler, Indiana Review and elsewhere. Cam received his PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and is currently a postdoctoral associate with the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies program at Duke University.

C. Bain is a gender-liminal writer-performer. His full-length poetry collection, Debridement, was a finalist for the 2016 Publishing Triangle Awards. He currently works to create beautiful, interdisciplinary, intersectional performance texts via Tiresias Projekt. He lives in Brooklyn. More at tiresiasprojekt.com.

makalani bandele is an Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem fellow. His work has been published in anthologies and widely in literary journals. He is the author of hellfightin’ and under the aegis of a winged mind, awarded the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize.

Quenton Baker is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. His work has appeared in The Offing, Jubilat, Vinyl, The Rumpus and elsewhere. He is a 2021 NEA Fellow and the author of This Glittering Republic (Willow Books, 2016).

Taneum Bambrick is the author of VANTAGE, which was selected by Sharon Olds for the 2019 American Poetry Review/Honickman first book award (Copper Canyon Press). Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Prize. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, she is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, an Environmental Writing Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, PEN America, Narrative, West Branch, The Missouri Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Amy Sayre Baptista’s book of small fiction, Primitivity, won the 2017 Black River Chapbook Contest (Black Lawrence Press). Her writing has appeared in The Best Small Fiction Anthology, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Butter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sou’wester, LUNA LUNA, and other journals. She is a SAFTA fellow (2015), a CantoMundo fellow (2013), and a scholarship recipient to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal (2011). She performs with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artists collective, and is a co-founder of Plates&Poetry, a community table program focused on food and writing. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, winner of the 2022 Tin House Next Book Fellowship, and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

Elana Bell is the author of Mother Country (BOA Editions 2020), poems about fertility, motherhood, and mental illness, and founder of the Mother Artist Salon. Her debut collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones (LSU Press 2012), received the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Elana is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Her writing has appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, and the Massachusetts Review, among others.  She was an inaugural finalist for the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, an award that recognizes and honors a poet who is doing innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change. In addition to facilitating her own Creative Fire workshops, Elana leads sacred sound journeys, teaches poetry to actors at the Juilliard School and sings with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a group of womxn activists and musicians committed to bringing joy and song to the resistance movement. www.elanabell.com.

Kimberly Blaeser, writer, photographer, and scholar, is the author of four poetry collections—most recently Copper Yearning(forthcoming 2019) and Apprenticed to Justice; and the editor of Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. A Professor of English and Indigenous Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Blaeser is also on faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts low rez MFA program in Santa Fe.  She served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-16. Her poetry is widely anthologized and her new work in “picto-poems” has been featured in various venues including the exhibits “Ancient Light” and “Visualizing Sovereignty.” Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Blaeser grew up on White Earth Reservation.

Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue as well as the chapbooks 7 x 7: kwansabas and THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali. Tara holds a Ph.D. from Binghamton University and a MFA from New England College. She is part of the MFA faculty at Chicago State University and Stonecoast-University of Southern Maine.

Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work has either appeared or is forthcoming in African American Review, Bettering American Poetry Volume II, The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic, The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, Split This Rock’s Poem of the Week, storySouth, and elsewhere. Destiny has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, and The MacDowell Colony. Read more at destinybirdsong.com.

Malika Booker’s poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize. She is published alongside poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). Malika won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem (2020), and currently lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet, curator, and workshop facilitator. A finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize, and the judge for The Maureen Egan 2018 Poetry Prize, Cheryl is the author of four collections of poetry: Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body and Arrival. A VONA Fellow, her work has been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Pluck, The Mom Egg Review, Adrienne and Killens Review of Arts & Letters. Cheryl earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast at The University of Southern Maine. She curates the Calypso Muse Reading Series in New York City. More at cherylboycetaylor.net.

F. Douglas Brown is the author of two poetry collections, ICON (Writ Large Press, 2018) and Zero to Three (University of Georgia, 2014), winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Prize. He is co-founder and co-curator of un::fade::able - The Requiem for Sandra Bland, a quarterly reading series examining restorative justice through poetry as a means to address racism.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry anthologies.  His first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta. Copper Canyon Press will release his new book, The Tradition, in April of 2019.

CM Burroughs is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago and author of The Vital System (Tupelo, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo, 2021,) which was longlisted for the National Book Award, Lambda Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground, and Best American Experimental Writing.

Cortney Lamar Charleston's poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review and Granta. A Pushcart Prize-winning poet, Charleston is a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and a Cave Canem Fellow. He also holds fellowships from the Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His collection, Telepathologies, won the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. His second collection is Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021).

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press), recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 winner of the Lambda Literary Award) and to make black paper sing (SpeCt! Books). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. A poetry editor of the Texas Review, they teach creative writing at Sam Houston State University. www.chinginchen.com

Franny Choi is the author of Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (2014). Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic, the Paris Review, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the poetry podcast VS with Danez Smith and is a Bolin Fellow in English at Williams College.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude, finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, and Blood of the Air winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize.

Liz Countryman is the author of A Forest Almost (Subito, 2017). She lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where she teaches in the MFA program at the University of South Carolina and co-edits the annual poetry journal Oversound.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler, winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Revising the Storm, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the NEA, his work has appeared in Crazyhorse​, ​​New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. Davis teaches with the University of Arkansas and The Rainier Writing Workshop. He is also poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

Ajanae Dawkins has been published in The Rumpus, BreakBeat Poets Black Girl Magic Anthology, The Offing and more. She received her MFA from Randolph College. She is a co-host of VS podcast, the theology editor for the EcoTheo Review, and an Alford Scholar at Methodist Theological School of Ohio.

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections: River Hymns, a 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, the New York Times, and Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, was a 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Award finalist. 

Stevie Edwards’ poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Edwards is the author of poetry collections Quiet Armor (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press, October 2023), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012), as well as chapbook Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018). 

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely, is translated into multiple languages, and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Tarfia currently teaches in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. 

Aricka Foreman is a poet, essayist, editor and educator from Detroit, MI. her poems, essays and features have appeared in The Offing, Buzzfeed, Vinyl, RHINO, The Blueshift Journal, Day One, shuf Poetry, James Franco Review, THRUSH, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin), among others. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber her debut full length Salt Body Shimmer was released by YesYes Books in April 2020.

Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Japan. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Kenyon Review, and North American Review. Her poetry collections include Where I Was Born (Willow Books, 2019), Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory (Tupelo, 2020), chapbooks: Mother Said, I Want Your Pain (Backbone Press, 2018), Silver Seasons of Heartache (Glass Lyre Press, 2017), and Home, No Home (Educe Press, 2016).

Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.  He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches in Indiana University’s MFA program.  

Jenn Givhan and Alicia Elkort began writing together after having met in an online poetry class. Their collaborative poems have been published in AGNI, Black Lawrence Press, Georgia Review, Missouri Review & forthcoming in Southeast Review. They most love writing under a desert sky while sharing a slice of raw chocolate cake.

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. His debut full-length poetry collection Fractures (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) was selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2020 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Winner of the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry and the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, Gómez has been published in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. For more, please visit: CarlosLive.com.

Jan-Henry Gray is the author of Documents (BOA Editions), selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of the Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, and Selected Emails, a chapbook from speCt! Books. An Undocupoets and Kundiman fellow, he’s a Visiting Professor at Adelphi University.

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Her work is published in POETRY, New York Times Magazine, and Kenyon Review. They hold fellowships from the NEA, the Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity, and Zoeglossia. Her collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound won the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Faylita Hicks is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award. They are a new voting member of the Recording Academy/Grammys, the Fall 2021 Shearing Fellow with Black Mountain Institute, and currently serve as the Poet-in-Residence for the Civil Rights Corps.

Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Her debut book of poems DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in May 2022. Follow her on Twitter @MyNrhindi.

Yvette Cornelia Holzwarth is a violinist, vocalist, composer, and music educator based in Los Angeles. Her diverse musical interests expand beyond her Western classical background and delve into Eastern European folk, Arabic, Americana, jazz, popular and improvised music. Yvette records, performs, and tours with many independent artists including Kamasi Washington, Gaby Moreno, and guitarist Miroslav Tadic. She highly values her creative collaborators and loves making interdisciplinary work with film, theater, dance, visual art, and poetry.

Nicole Homer’s collection, Pecking Order (Write Bloody), was an Eric Hoffer Poetry Award winner and Paterson Poetry Prize finalist. A fellow of both The Watering Hole and Callaloo, Homer serves as an Editor at BlackNerdProblems. They are New Jersey State Council on the Arts 2020 Fellow.

Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections origin story and Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry. He’s an associate professor in English and creative writing at the College of Charleston.

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alum, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

Born in the Philippines, Janine Joseph is the author of Driving without a License (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, 2018 da Vinci Eye Award, and a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Award and 2017 Oklahoma Book Award. A librettist, her commissioned work for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco include What Wings They Were: The Case of Emeline, “On This Muddy Water”: Voices from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother's Mother. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, World Literature Today, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Zócalo Public Square, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An organizer for Undocupoets, Janine is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University.  

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize, and A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco Books 2018). Her poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, POETRY, The Literary Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, The Home School in Miami, the Aspen Institute, New York University, the University of Chicago, and Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. In 2017, she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Chicago.

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis teaches at Columbus College of Art & Design, where she serves as faculty advisor to Botticelli Literary/Art Magazine. Her stories have appeared in a number of journals and won awards in Glimmer Train, Story magazine,Los Angeles Review and others. A collaborative chapbook:  Aloha, Vaudeville Doll was published in 2014 by Dancing Girl Press. Her previous collection Intaglio, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize was published in 2006 by Kent State University Press. Her second collection of poetry, The Rub, winner of the Elixir Press Editor’s Prize, was published in 2014.  She and her husband, Mitch Lear host a writers’ and artists’ residency at Aggy Road Farm,  and a slew of critters at Our Farm Sanctuary. 

Keetje Kuipers’ third collection, All Its Charms, was published by BOA Editions in 2019. Her poems have appeared widely, including in The New York Times Magazine, as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Previously a Wallace Stegner fellow, Bread Loaf fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, Kuipers is currently Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

Shayla Lawson is the author of THIS IS MAJOR: NOTES ON DIANA ROSS, DARK GIRLS & BEING DOPE (Harper Perennial, 2020), the poetry collections—I THINK I'M READY TO SEE FRANK OCEAN, A SPEED EDUCATION IN HUMAN BEING, and PANTONE. She was raised in Lexington, Kentucky, is a professor at Amherst College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of the poetry collections Threshold and Imago, both from CavanKerry Press; and three chapbooks: Postcards (Ghost Bird Press), Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), and Subways (Thrush Press). His works have appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, and Best of the Net. He co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. He lives with his husband in Queens, NY.

Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her new collection, The Carrying, was released by Milkweed Editions in August of 2018 and was named one of the top five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the online and summer programs for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer in Lexington, Kentucky.

Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2023), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, and author of Blue Hallelujahs. Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other outlets.

Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, editor, educator, and MC. His most recent book, Finna, was recognized as one of the best books of 2020 by NPR and The New York Public Library. A proud Chicago Public Schools alumnus. Nate completed his MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers' Program. He holds a B.A. in English and African American Diaspora Studies from Vanderbilt University. Marshall has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Poetry Foundation, and The University of Michigan. Nate loves his family, friends, Black people, dope art, literature, history, comedy, arguing about top 5 lists, and beating you in spades.

Irène Mathieu is a pediatrician, writer, and public health researcher. She is the 2016 winner of the Bob Kaufman Book Prize and Yemassee Journal's Poetry Prize, and author of the book orogeny (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017) and poetry chapbook the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press & studio, 2014). Irène has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She is a poetry book reviewer for Muzzle Magazine, an editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine's humanities section, and a contributing author on the Global Health Hub blog. Irène holds a BA in International Relations from the College of William & Mary and a MD from Vanderbilt University. She is on the speakers' bureau for Jack Jones Literary Arts and currently resides in Philadelphia.

Carlo Matos has published ten books of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including The Quitters (Tortoise Books) and It's Best Not to Interrupt Her Experiments (Negative Capability Press). He has also published poems, stories, and essays in Diagram, Rhino, and PANK, among many others. Carlo has received grants and fellowships from the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, the Illinois Arts Council, and the La Romita School of Art in Italy. He currently lives in Chicago, is a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, and a former kickboxer and MMA fighter. He blogs at carlomatos.blogspot.com.

Rachel McKibbens is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and author of blud, Pink Elephant, Into the Dark & Emptying Field, and the chapbook, MAMMOTH. She founded The Pink Door Writing Retreat and co-curates the acclaimed literary series Poetry & Pie Night.

Rachel Mennies is the author of The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021) and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards (Texas Tech University Press, 2014), winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her poems and essays have been published at The Believer, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She serves as the book reviews editor for AGNI and the series editor, since 2016, of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mennies currently lives in Chicago, where she works as a writer, editor, and adjunct professor.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of six poetry collections and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her first play, Waiting for God, is out of Apocalypse Party in January 2022. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. https://www.vikhinao.com

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Books Literature Award, and of What Happens Is Neither, forthcoming from Four Way Books. Recent work appears in POETRY, Cortland Review, and TriQuarterly. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She serves as reviews editor for RHINO.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Oceanic, 2019 winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her collection of nature essays is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions and she is professor of English in The University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

Hoa Nguyen’s books include Red Juice, Violet Energy Ingots, and, also from Wave Books, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (April 2021). As a public proponent and advocate of contemporary poetry, she has served as guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry series and performed and lectured at numerous institutions including Princeton University, St. Mary’s College, Poet’s House, and the Banff Centre’s Writers Studio.  She teaches poetics for Miami University’s low residency MFA program, the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and in a popular, long-running poetics workshop she leads from cyberspace and Toronto.

Margaret Noodin received an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she also serves as the Director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education. She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literatureand Weweni, a collection of bilingual poems in Ojibwe and English. Her poems have been anthologized in Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Poetry Magazine, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Water Stone Review, andYellow Medicine Review. With her daughters, Shannon and Fionna, she is a member of Miskwaasining Nagamojig (the Swamp Singers) a women’s hand drum group. To see and hear current projects visit www.ojibwe.net where she and other students and speakers of Ojibwe have created a space for language to be shared by academics and the native community. 

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT.

Soham Patel is an assistant editor at Fence and The Georgia Review and is the author of the poetry collections to afar from afar (The Accomplices) and ever really hear it (Subito).

Maggie Queeney is the author of In Kind, winner of the 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize, and a poetry chapbook, settler. Recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize and The Ruth Stone Scholarship, her most recent work is found or is forthcoming in Guernica, The Missouri Review, and The American Poetry Review. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, and reads and writes in Chicago.

Ruben Quesada is the editor of a hybrid collection titled Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. He is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal: Poems. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles.

Margaret Rhee is a poet, new media artist, and scholar. She is the author of Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2017) named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine, awarded an Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and the 2019 Book Prize in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. She is also the author of poetry chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011), and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), awarded a 2017 Elgin Award, Science Fiction Poetry Association and named a 2015 Split This Rock Poetry Book We Love.

Brittany Rogers is a poet, educator, and native Detroiter. She is Editor in Chief for Muzzle Magazine and co-host of VS Podcast. To learn more about Brittany or to engage with her work visit  www.brittanyrogers.org. 

Alison C. Rollins holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Born and raised in St. Louis city, she currently works as a Reference & Instruction Librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has most recently been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is a recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. Her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press April 2019. More info at www.alisoncrollins.com.

Jacob Saenz was born in Chicago and raised in Cicero, Illinois. He earned a BA in creative writing from Columbia College in Chicago. His first collection of poetry, Throwing the Crown, was awarded the 2018 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and is forthcoming from Coppery Canyon Press. He has been an editor at Columbia Poetry Review and an associate editor at RHINO. He works as an acquisitions assistant at the Columbia College library and has read his poetry at a number of Chicago venues. A CantoMundo fellow, he has also been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship.

Nicole Sealey: Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming to Best American Poetry 2018, The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation and the 2018-2019 Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at The City College of New York.

Tim Seibles is the author of six collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), and Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award. His latest work of poetry, One Turn Around the Sun was published by Etruscan Press in 2017. His poems has been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Evie Shockley earned her BA from Northwestern University, studied Law at the University of Michigan, and earned her PhD in English from Duke University. Shockley authored  semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Hurston/Wright Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), which also won the Hurston/Wright Award; 31 words * prose poems (Belladonna* Books, 2007); a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and The Gorgon Goddess (Carolina Wren Press,2001). A Cave Canem graduate fellow, Shockley has received the Lannan Poetry Prize, the Stephen Henderson Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize.  Her poetry has also been supported by Radcliffe, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook. Shockley is known for embracing both free verse and formal structures. She straddles the divide between traditional and experimental poetics. she teaches African American Literature and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in New Jersey.

Bianca Lynne Spriggs is a poet and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications, 2010), How Swallowtails Become Dragons (Accents Publishing, 2011), The Galaxy is a Dance Floor (Argos Books, 2016), and Call Her By Her Name (Northwestern University Press, 2016). She is the editor of The Swallowtale Project: Creative Writing for Incarcerated Women (2012), and co-editor of the anthologies, Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women (Accent's Publishing, 2015), Undead: A Poetry Anthology of Ghouls, Ghosts, and More (Apex Publications, 2017), and Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets(University of Kentucky Press, 2018).

Courtney Faye Taylor is a writer, visual artist, and the author of Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Concentrate was awarded the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and other honors. Courtney lives in Atlanta, Georgia where she is working on her second book.

Brian Teare’s most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven and Poem Bitten By a Man. He lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Sara Wainscott is the author of Insecurity System, winner of the 2019 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize (Persea, 2020). She lives outside Chicago.

Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, IL and author of the book Thief in the Interior (Alice James 2016). A recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Whiting Award, he currently teaches at Bennington College and the Randolph College low-residency MFA.

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet, Cave Canem fellow, and graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. He has received three scholarships from Bread Loaf as well as scholarships from MacDowell, UCross, Millay Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. Keith serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Four Way Review and Digital Media Editor at Obsidian Journal. Keith's first book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, will be published by Copper Canyon in 2019.

L. Lamar Wilson lives with Erb’s palsy, a couple of valences of neurodivergence, and other invisible gifts, including the ones shaping this poem. His documentary poetics animates Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013) and The Changing Same, a collaboration with Rada Film Group (POV Shorts, 2019), which streams at American Documentary and airs on PBS. He teaches creative writing, African American poetics, and film studies at Florida State University and the Mississippi University for Women.

Jane Wong's poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poetry, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and Bread Loaf. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.