Bios

Emari DiGiorgio

Emari DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018), the winner of the 2017  Numinous  Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She’s the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

She’s received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

Instagram: @emari_digiorgio

Meg Wade

Meg Wade is a 2017 National Poetry Series finalist. She is a former Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Creative Writing Institute, and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her manuscript, Slick Like Dark, won the 2017 Snowbound Chapbook Award and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Meg is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies. She lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.

Instagram: @meg_wade_

Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal  is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee;  the hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. Her newest work of nonfiction is a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam. A new collection of poems, Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, was published spring 2019.  Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021.  She is the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020.

Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others.  

She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of the community web projects Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City. In May 2017, she was named Utah’s Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets’ Poets Laureate Fellowship. 

Lauren Camp

Lauren Camp is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM and other journals. Winner of the Dorset Prize, Camp has also received fellowships from The Black Earth Institute and The Taft-Nicholson Center, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish and Arabic. She lives in New Mexico, where she teaches creative writing to people of all ages.

Instagram: @laurencamp

Tyree Daye

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina, and a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of two poetry collections River Hymns 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner and Cardinal forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press 2020. Daye is a Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, New York Times, Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at UC Santa Barbara, and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. Daye most recently was awarded a 2019 Whiting Writers Award.

Instagram: @daye_ty

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and included in multiple volumes of Best American Poetry. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Instagram: @poetmajorjackson

Paula Mendoza

Paula Mendoza earned her MFA at the University of Michigan, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. Her first book, Play for Time, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, and launched in spring of 2020. She lives and writes in Salt Lake City.

Instagram: @paulajanemendoza
Twitter: @paula_jane_

Diamond Forde

Diamond Forde is a PhD candidate at Florida State. Her debut collection, Mother Body, was chosen by Patricia Smith for the Saturnalia Poetry Prize, and will be forthcoming in Spring 2021. She is a recipient of the 2020 Furious Flower Prize, the Margaret Walker Memorial prize, and the third-place winner of the Frontier Award for New Poets. She is a Callaloo and Tin House fellow, and her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, The Offing, and more. 

Instagram: @poemsandcake

Jake Levine

Jake Levine is an American translator, poet, and scholar. He received both his BA and MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently Abd in a PhD program in Comparative Literature at Seoul National University. He works as an assistant professor of creative writing at Keimyung University and as a lecturer at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. He is the assistant editor at Acta Koreana and the editor for the Korean poetry series Moon Country at Black Ocean. Previously he served as the editor-in-chief of Sonora Review and as the poetry editor of Spork Press. His translation of Kim Kyung Ju’s poetry collection I Am a Season That Doesn’t Exist in the World (Black Ocean, 2016) was a finalist for ALTA’s Lucien Stryk Prize. In 2018 his translation of Kim Kyung Ju’s verse play Bred from the Eyes of a Wolf came out with Plays Inverse. Last spring saw the release of his co-translation of Kim Yideum’s Hysteria (Action Books) and a special collection of translations of Contemporary Korean Women Authors that he edited for Puerto Del Sol. He also co-translated the Poems of Kim Minjeong, Kim Haengsook, and Kim Yideum with Don Mee Choi, Johannes Goransson and Jiyoon Lee. His translations of Kim Kyung Ju’s poetry collection Whale and Vapor (Black Ocean) and verse-play Butterfly Sleep (Tupelo Press) came out in the last six months.    

Kamilah Aisha Moon

The author of Starshine & Clay (2017), a CLMP Firecracker Award finalist featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” as a collection that captures America in poetry, and She Has a Name (2013), a finalist for both the Audre Lorde and Lambda Literary Awards, Kamilah Aisha Moon’s work has been published widely, including in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, PBS Newshour, Buzzfeed and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize winner and 2015 New American Poet who has received fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook, she holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.

Instagram: @kamilahaishamoon

Caridad Moro-Gronlier

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize for Florida for her book Tortilleraforthcoming by Texas Review Press in the Spring of 2021. She is also as the editor of Grabbed: Writers Respond to Sexual Assaultforthcoming from Beacon Press in the Fall of 2020, as well as an Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day, a daily poetry journal. 

Moro-Gronlier is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, The Best of the Net and a Lambda Literary Award and her chapbook Visionware was published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women’s Voices Series. 

Her recent work can be found at The Best American Poetry Blog, Rhino, Go Magazine, Fantastical Florida, Notre Dame Review and others. 

She resides in Miami, FL with her wife and son.

Instagram: @caridadmoro

Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/S&S. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel, Love, Love was published by Sterling Publishing. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the Program Chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program. She also serves on the National Book Critics Circle Board. 

Instagram: @fattery12

Roberto Carlos Garcia

Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. His second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books.  Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press. 

His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many oth

Instagram: @robertobelike

Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of seventeen poetry books and the memoir How I Discovered Poetry. She is also the author of The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, which won the 1998 Poets’ Prize, Carver: A Life In Poems, which won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award athe Flora Stieglitz Strus Award, and Fortune’s Bones, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Frost Medal. She was the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

Ruben Quesada

Ruben Quesada is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal. He is as a blogger at The Kenyon Review and poetry editor at AGNI. He currently serves as the Vice-Chair of the State of Illinois Poet Laureate search committee and as a member of the PEN America Literary Awards committee. 

Cynthia Atkins

Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers and In The Event Of Full Disclosure, and Still-Life With God. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Apogee, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, The Cortland Review, Cultural Weekly, Diode, Florida Review, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Rust +Moth, Seneca Review, SWWIM, Tinderbox, Thrush, and Verse Daily.  Formerly the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, she has taught English and Creative Writing, most recently at Blue Ridge Community College, where she curated a quarterly Reading Series.  Atkins is an Interviews Editor at American Microreviews and Interviews.  She earned her MFA from Columbia University, and fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work, with several nominations from The Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes.

Instagram: @cynthia.atkins1

Roy G. Guzmán

Roy G. Guzmán is a Honduran poet whose first collection, Catrachos, was published by Graywolf Press on May 5, 2020. 

Raised in Miami, Florida, Roy is the recipient of a 2019 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2017, they were named a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. They are also the recipient of a 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board Initiative grant and the 2016 Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Their work has been included in the Best New Poets 2017 anthology, guest-edited by Natalie Diaz, and Best of the Net 2017, guest-edited by Eduardo C. Corral.  

Instagram: @roygbiv5403

Faylita Hicks

Faylita Hicks (pronouns: she/her/they) is a poet, essayist, and interdisciplinary artist. The editor-in-chief of the Austin-based literary journal Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, they are the author of Hoodwitch(Acre Books, 2019) a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary award for bisexual poetry, the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize, and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies from Tin House, Lambda Literary, Jack Jones Literary Arts, and the Right of Return USA,  the first fellowship designed exclusively for previously incarcerated artists. Their work has been featured in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Huffpost, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, Slate, Texas Observer, Texas Monthly,and others. Hicks received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University.

Instagram: @faylitahicks

Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson.  Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children’s book Janna and the Kingsand the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.

Instagram: @pswordwoman

Ashanti Anderson

Ashanti Anderson (she/her) is a Black Queer writer. Multi-genre by nature and necessity, she has published poems, optioned screenplays, and written essays on various matters pertaining to corporeal violence, resistance, and resilience. In particular, Ashanti’s work centers the mental and emotional wellbeing of marginalized folks. By writing of the full capacity of feeling of the Other, Ashanti complicates otherwise dehumanizing narratives by highlighting the agency and autonomy of the oppressed. 

Ashanti was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2018 Tennessee Williams Festival Poetry Contest. Her short film script, “Study Room,” won the Haley’s Flight Short Film Script Competition in 2017. Ashanti’s work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications, including POETRY, World Literature Today, and Psychology of Music. Ashanti currently lives in south Texas.

Instagram: @ashanticreates

Nazifa Islam

Nazifa Islam dissects and examines the bipolar experience through her writing. To that end, she is currently working on both a series of Virginia Woolf found poems and a series of Sylvia Plath found poems. Her found poems have appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Believer, DIAGRAM, Passages North, The Journal, and Beloit Poetry Journal among other publications, and her poetry collection Searching for a Pulse (2013) was released by Whitepoint Press. She earned her MFA at Oregon State University.

Instagram: @nafoopal

Luther Hughes

Luther Hughes, born and raised in Seattle, is the author of Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), Founder of Shade Literary Arts, and Executive Editor for the The Offing. Along with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat, he co-hosts The Poet Salonpodcast. His work has been published in Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review,The Rumpus, and others. He is the recipient of the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Luther received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. 

Instagram: @lutherxhughes

Krysten Hill

Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets, apt, B O D Y, Boiler Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Muzzle, PANK,Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine Review and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, she received her MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Boston, where she currently teaches.

Michael Torres

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names(Beacon Press, 2020) was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Currently he’s an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. 

Instagram: @michaelpolodot01

Theresa Davis

Theresa Davis is one of Atlanta’s best known performance poets, giving voice to the things that you’ve been thinking but never could articulate. Theresa has gone on to forge an impressive career as a solo performer, winning poetry slams and featuring at spoken word venues around Atlanta and the nation, as well as leading writing and performance workshops and headlining conferences across the southeast. She is a member of The Word Diversity Collective/Art Amok and represented Atlanta as a member of the 2006 – 2010 Art Amok Slam Team. In 2009 Theresa was ranked 8th female poet in the world as a finalist in the Women of the World Poetry Slam. Theresa Davis has shared the stage with Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda, Pearl Cleage and Doria Roberts in The Vagina Monologues, with Berniece Johnson Reagan (Sweet Honey in the Rock) and with Def Poet Jon Goode in their joint production of “Wish You Were Here” at 7 Stages Theater in Atlanta, Georgia.

Instagram: @shepiratepoet

Ysabel Y. Gonzalez

Newark, NJ native Ysabel Y. Gonzalez,  received her BA from Rutgers University, an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and works as the Assistant Director for the Poetry Program at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Ysabel has received invitations to attend VONA, Tin House, Ashbery Home School and BOAAT Press workshops. She’s a CantoMundo Fellow, and has been published in Paterson Literary Review; Tinderbox Journal; Anomaly; Vinyl; Waxwing Literary Journal, and others.  She is the author of Wild Invocations (Get Fresh Book, 2019)

Instagram: @yboricuay

Kamden Hilliard

Kamden Hilliard is the author of Perceived Distance from Impact (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), Distress Tolerance (Magic Helicopter Press, 2016), hence force: a travel poetic (Omnidawn Books, 2019). They are a graduate fellow at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and live in Iowa City, Iowa.

Instagram: @killyardtrillyard

Jessica Jacobs

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year and a current finalist for the Golden Crown Literary Society and Julie Suk Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock-climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as the Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored the forthcoming Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on parallel collections of essays and poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.

Instagram: @jlgjacobs

Chelsea Rathburn

Chelsea Rathburn is the poet laureate of Georgia and the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, which received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collections are A Raft of Grief and The Shifting Line. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review and the Southern Review, among others, and she’s published personal essays in Creative Nonfiction and the Rumpus. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Mercer University in Macon. 

Instagram: @chelsea_rathburn

Taylor Johnson

Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. Their poems appear in The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and theParis Review, among other journals and literary magazines. Their first book, Inheritance, will be published November 2020 with Alice James Books. Taylor lives in New Orleans.

Instagram: @hoodsnax

Joy Priest

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP. She is the recipient of the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Prize, and has work published or forthcoming in APR, The Atlantic, ESPN, Poetry Northwest, Poets & Writers, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. 

Instagram: @dalai_mama

Megan Sexton

Megan Sexton’s collection of poems, Swift Hour, received the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. She is the Editor of Five Points: A Journal of Literature & Art and teaches in the Department of English at Georgia State University.

Her poetry and nonfiction have been widely published in anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, The Literary Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.

She lives in Decatur and plays drums for The Skylarks.

Instagram: @mmsextonpoet

Traci Brimhall

Traci Brimhall is the author of four poetry collections: Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon); Saudade (Copper Canyon); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry.  She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Instagram: @our_lady_of_nod

Brynn Saito

Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry from Red Hen Press, Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She recently authored the chapbook and online letter archive, Dear—, with an artist’s grant from Densho, an organization dedicated to sharing the story of the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Brynn is an assistant professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at California State University, Fresno and co-director of Yonsei Memory Project.

Instagram: @brynnsaito

Angela Narciso Torres

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books, 2013), To the Bone (Sundress Publications, 2020), and What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books, 2021).  Her recent work appears in POETRY, Waxwing, and TriQuarterly. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, she is a senior and reviews editor for RHINO.

Instagram: @angelatorres

Allison Benis White

Allison Benis White is the author of The Wendys(Four Way Books 2020), Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her work has appeared in TheAmerican Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Instagram: @allisonbeniswhite

Graham Barnhart

Graham Barnhart served as a Special Forces medic in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate teaching fellow at the University of North Texas. In 2019, the University of Chicago Press published his first collection of poems titled The War Makes Everyone Lonely. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Beloit Poetry Journal, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Sewanee Review, and others. He was recently named the recipient of the 2015 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Instagram: @insteadgraham

Tommye Blount

A Cave Canem alum, Tommye Blount is the author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue(Four Way Books, 2020) and What Are We Not For(Bull City Press, 2016). A graduate from Warren Wilson College, he has been the recipient of a fellowship from Kresge Arts in Detroit and the John Atherton scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work has been featured in Magma, New England Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Ecotone, Ninth Letter,Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye now lives in Novi, Michigan.

Instagram: @tommyeblount

Aricka Foreman

Aricka is an American poet and interdisciplinary writer from Detroit MI. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber and Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books), she has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Offing, and spends her time in Chicago, IL where she engages poetry with photography & video and works as a publicist for Haymarket Books.

Instagram: @blkfemmepoetics

Luke Hankins

Luke Hankins is the author of two poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, as well as a collection of essays, The Work of Creation. He is also the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. A volume of his translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, was released by Seagull Books in 2019. Hankins is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

Instagram: @hankins.luke

Jacqueline Balderrama

Jacqueline Balderrama is the author of Now in Color  recently released from Perugia Press and the chapbook Nectar and Small (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She serves as a poetry editor for Iron City Magazine and has been involved in the Letras Latinas literary initiative, the ASU Prison Education Program, and the Wasatch Writers in the Schools. Currently, she’s pursuing her doctorate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah.the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

Instagram: @jackiebalderrama

Dominique Christina

Dominique Christina is an award-winning poet, author, educator, and activist. She holds five national poetry slam titles in four years, including the 2014 & 2012 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. Her work is greatly influenced by her family’s legacy in the Civil Rights Movement and by the idea that words make worlds. She is the author of four books and a writer/actor for the HBO series High Maintenance Season 2. Her fourth book “Anarcha Speaks” won the National Poetry Series award in 2017. 

Instagram: @dominiquechristina

C. Russell Price

C. Russell Price is an Appalachian genderqueer Virginian living in Chicago. They are the author of Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other (Sibling Rivalry Press), a Lambda Fellow, a Ragdale Fellow, Literary Death Match Champion, New City Lit 50 Honoree, and Windy City Times 30 Under 30 Honoree. Their work has appeared in Boston Review, Court Green, DIAGRAM, Iron Horse Literary Review, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry, PANK, and elsewhere. Their full length poetry collection The Devil Has Been Busy Today; or, oh, you thought this was a date?!: APOCALYPSE POEMS is forthcoming in Spring 2021.

Instagram: @c.russellprice

Alison C. Rollins

Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colorado College. She also serves as faculty for Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low-Residency MFA program. She is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2018 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and in 2020 the winner of a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes is with Copper Canyon Press.

Instagram: @alisoncrollins

Joy Ladin

Joy Ladin is the author of nine books of poetry, including 2017’s The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems, and two Lambda Literary Award finalists Impersonation and Transmigration. Her current poetry project, Shekhinah Speaks, was featured in the April 2020 edition of Poetry. Her memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life, was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist; another work of creative non-fiction, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Triangle Award. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, among other honors. She holds the Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. Episodes of her online conversation series, “Containing Multitudes,” are available at JewishLive.org/multitudes. 

Rosebud Ben-Oni

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online.  She writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She recently edited a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. 

Instagram: @matarose

Lynn Melnick

Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik (forthcoming 2022), Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022.

Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn. 

Instagram: @Lynn_Melnick

Rachel Neve-Midbar

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds won the 2018 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and was published by Tebot Bach in January 2020. She is also the author of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014). Rachel’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist and Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. Rachel’s awards include the Crab Orchard Review Richard Peterson Prize, the Passenger Poetry Prize and nominations for The Pushcart Prize. Rachel is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Instagram: @superema63

Francisco Aragón

Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. His books include, After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020), Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010), and Puerta de Sol (Bilingual Press, 2005).  He’s also the editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry(University of Arizona Press, 2007). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as various literary journals, both print and online. A native of San Francisco, CA, he is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), where he teaches courses in Latinx poetry and creative writing. He also directs the ILS’ literary initiative, Letras Latinas. A finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award for poetry and activism, he has read his work widely, including at universities, bookstores, art galleries, the Dodge Poetry Festival and the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. A CantoMundo fellow, he is also a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop

Instagram: @fjaragon2011

Miguel Murphy

Miguel Murphy is the author most recently of Detainee. He lives in Southern California where he teaches at Santa Monica College.

Instagram: @miguelmurphy

Casey Rocheteau

Casey Rocheteau was born on Cape Cod, and raised as a sea witch. They are a Callaloo Writer’s Workshop, Cave Canem, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellow and, a former Writer in Residence at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. Their second poetry collection, The Dozen, was released on Sibling Rivalry Press in 2016. Winner of inaugural Write A House permanent residency in 2014, Rocheteau resides in a home they won with poems. Their writing has appeared in Apogee, The American Academy of Poets, Amazon’s Day One, The Offing, LitHub, Barnes and Noble Review among others.

Instagram: @crochetypoet

Tamara‌ ‌Zbrizher‌

Tamara‌ ‌Zbrizher‌ ‌is‌ ‌a‌ ‌Ukrainian‌ ‌American‌ ‌poet.‌ ‌She‌ ‌received‌ ‌her‌ ‌MFA‌ ‌at‌ ‌Drew‌ ‌University.‌ ‌ ‌Her‌ ‌work‌ ‌has‌ ‌been‌ ‌published‌ ‌in‌ ‌Event,‌ ‌Grist,‌ ‌Tinderbox‌ ‌Journal,‌ ‌Lunch‌ ‌Ticket,‌ ‌Naugatuck‌ ‌River‌ ‌Review,‌ ‌Mom‌ ‌Egg‌ ‌Review‌ ‌and‌ ‌others.‌ ‌Tamara’s‌ ‌work‌ ‌has‌ ‌been‌ ‌nominated‌ ‌for‌ ‌a‌ ‌Pushcart‌ ‌Prize‌ ‌and‌ ‌Best‌ ‌of‌ ‌The‌ ‌Net.‌ ‌Her‌ ‌first‌  ‌full-length‌ ‌collection‌ ‌Tell‌ ‌Me‌ ‌Something‌ ‌Good‌ ‌was‌ ‌released‌ ‌from‌ ‌Get‌ ‌Fresh‌ ‌Books‌ ‌in‌ ‌April,‌ ‌2019.‌ ‌She‌ ‌lives‌ ‌in‌ ‌New‌ ‌Jersey‌ ‌with‌ ‌her‌ ‌son‌ ‌and‌ ‌two‌ ‌overfed‌ ‌cats.‌ 

Instagram: @tomadoma7711

Nin Andrews

Nin Andrews’ poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, and four editions of Best American Poetry.  She is the author of 7 chapbooks and 7 full-length poetry collections. Her next book, The Last Orgasm, will be published by Etruscan Press in October 2020.

Instagram: @nin_andrews

Geffrey Davis

Geffrey Davis is the author of two full-length collections: Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm ​(BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He also cowrote the chapbook Begotten (URB Books, 2016) with LA-based poet and friend F. Douglas Brown. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, New England Review, ​​The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.‌ 

Instagram: @geffrey_davis

José Olivarez

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 The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he is the co-editor of the anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT.  In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Instagram: @_joseolivarez

Donna Vorreyer

Donna Vorreyer is the author of three full-length collections of poetry:To Everything There Is (Sundress Publications, 2020),Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016), and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013).

Donna has also published seven chapbooks: The Girl (2017, Porkbelly Press), Tinder, Smolder, Bones and Snow(2016, dancing girl press), Encantado, Illustrated by Matt Kish (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015), We Build Houses of Our Bodies (dancing girl press, 2013), The Imagined Life of A Pioneer Wife (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013), Ordering the Hours (Maverick Duck Press, 2012), and Womb/Seed/Fruit (Finishing Line Press, 2010).

Instagram: @djv50

Elisa Albo

Elisa Albo was born in Havana and raised in Florida. Her poetry chapbook Passage to America intones her immigrant story while Each Day More elegizes friends, family, and strangers. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Alimentum, Bomb Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, InterLitQ, MiPoesias, Notre Dame Review, SWWIM Every Day and in anthologies like Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents and Vinegar and Char. She is a co-editor with Richard Blanco, Caridad Moro and Nikki Moustaki of the new anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Harassment, Empowerment, and Healing. An associate editor for South Florida Poetry Journal, she has an MFA from Florida International University where she won Academy of American Poets awards for poetry. A professor of English and ESL at Broward College, she has received Endowed Teaching and Professor of the Year awards and lives with her husband and daughters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco is the fifth presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history—the youngest, first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami, the negotiation of cultural identity and place characterize his body of work. He is the author of the poetry collections Looking for the Gulf Motel, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, and City of a Hundred Fires; the poetry chapbooks Matters of the Sea, One Today, and Boston Strong; a children’s book of his inaugural poem, “One Today,” illustrated by Dav Pilkey; and Boundaries, a collaboration with photographer Jacob Hessler. His latest book of poems, How to Love a Country (Beacon Press, 2019), both interrogates the American narrative, past and present, and celebrates the still unkept promise of its ideals. He has also authored the memoirs The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood and For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey. Blanco’s many honors include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and two Maine Literary Awards. He has been a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College, and the University of Rhode Island. He has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR’s Fresh Air. The Academy of American Poets named him its first Education Ambassador in 2015. Blanco has continued to write occasional poems for organizations and events such as the re-opening of the U.S. embassy in Havana. He lives with his partner in Bethel, ME.

Instagram: @poetrichardblanco

Jenny Molberg

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the 2014 Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017) and Refusal (LSU Press, 2020). She received a 2019-2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, West Branch, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, and other publications. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and co-edits Pleiades magazine.

Jen Karetnick

Jen Karetnick’s fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020). She is also the author of the collections, Hunger Until It’s Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023), and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. In addition, she is the author of five poetry chapbooks, including The Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been awarded the 2020 Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, the Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, among others. Her work appears recently or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain, Under a Warm Green Linden, and elsewhere. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Jen is a 2019-2020 Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence.

Instagram: @jenkaretnick

Catherine Esposito Prescott

Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings and The Living Ruin. Recent poems appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Gone Lawn, Green Mountains Review Online, Flyway, MiPOesias, NELLE, Pleiades, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, as well as The Orison Anthology, and Grabbed: Writers Respond to Sexual Assault. Co-founder and editor in chief of SWWIM Every Day, Prescott teaches vinyasa yoga and yoga philosophy. She lives in Miami Beach with her husband and three children.

Instagram: @catprescott

Joshua Escobar

Joshua Escobar is the author of new debut collection Bareback Nightfall (Noemi Press), as well as the chapbooks Caljforkya Voltage and xxox fm. He was a 2019 Shandaken: Storm King Fellow, the Dean’s Fellow in Writing at the MFA Program at Bard College, and a Merit Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is a Regional Chair (California) for CantoMundo, and he teaches at Santa Barbara City College.

Instagram: @djashtrae17

Benjamin Garcia

Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, THROWN IN THE THROAT (Milkweed Editions, August 2020), was selected by Kazim Ali for the 2019 National Poetry Series. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator throughout the Finger Lakes region of New York. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Lithub, and New England Review. 

Instagram: @bengarciapoet

Mark Ward

Mark Ward is the author of the chapbooks, Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Carcass (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020) and a full-length collection, Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, 2022). He was the Poet Laureate for Glitterwolf and his poems have been featured in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Boyne Berries, Skylight47, Assaracus, Tincture, Cordite, Softblow and many more, as well as anthologies, the most recent of which is Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman. He was Highly Commended in the 2019 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and in 2020 he was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series. His poem, ‘Vegas Epithalamion,’ was recorded and broadcast for Irish National Broadcaster RTÉ’s Radio 1 show, Arena. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry, now in its fourth year.

Instagram: @faekplastiksteev

Jihyun Yun

Jihyun Yun is a Korean American poet from the Bay Area in California. A Fulbright Research Fellow, her debut poetry collection SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY was a 2019 Prairie Schooner Prize Winner and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2020. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Narrative, Adroit and elsewhere. She currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan where she is working on a middle-grade novel

Instagram: @jihyun.o.yun

Cortney Lamar Charleston

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, and Doppelgangbanger, forthcoming in February 2021 from Haymarket Books. He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Granta, The Nation and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.

Instagram: @bardsbesidebars

Victoria C. Flanagan

Victoria C. Flanagan is the author of Glossary of Unsaid Terms, winner of Beloit Poetry Journal‘s 2020 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize. Their writing has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Emerging Poets Prize from Palette Poetry, and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, among other honors. Flanagan’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Boiler, New South, and Blackbird, among other journals. A North Carolina native, they hold a dual-genre MFA in poetry and nonfiction from Virginia Commonwealth University, and are the 2020-21 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

Instagram: @Victoria.catherine

Alice Friman

Alice Friman’s new book is Blood Weather from LSU Press. Her last two books (both LSU) are Vinculum, which won a 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award, and The View from Saturn. Other books include Inverted Fire and The Book of the Rotten Daughter (both BkMk), and Zoo (Arkansas), which won the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award. Other awards are two Pushcart Prizes, appearance in The Best American Poetry, the Paumanok Prize, and three prizes from Poetry Society of America: the Consuelo Ford, the Cecil Hemley, and the Lucille Medwick Awards. From The New England Poetry Club, the Gretchen Warren and Firman Houghton Awards, and, twice, the Erika Mumford Prize. She also received the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry (Shenandoah) and the Ekphrasis Prize for Poetry (Ekphrasis). Friman has fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay, VCCA, and the Bernheim Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, and many others, incuding publication in fourteen other countries. Her essays/reviews appear in The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine), in Sleeping with One Eye Open (Georgia), in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, and The Georgia Review. Professor Emerita at U of Indianapolis, Friman was Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College. 

Suzi F. Garcia

Suzi F. Garcia is the author of the chapbook, A Home Grown Fairytale (Bone Bouquet, 2020.) The daughter of a Peruvian immigrant, raised in Arkansas, she has an MFA in Creative Writing with minors in Screen Cultures and Gender Studies.

Suzi is an Executive Editor at Noemi Press, where she has worked with authors such as the Blunt Research Group, Jennifer Tamayo, Roberto Tejada, Thirii Myint, and Vanessa Villarreal. In addition, she is the Online Editor for the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Suzi is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondista, and participated in the first ever Poetry Incubator at the Poetry Foundation. She currently serves as the CantoMundo Regional Chair for the Midwest.

Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming from POETRY Magazine, the Offing, Vinyl, Fence Magazine, and more. She has presented at PCA/ACA, AWP, and Console-ing Passions, among other national conferences. 

Instagram: @suzi_f_g

William Archila

William Archila, author of The Art of Exile, 2010 International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, 2013 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, has been published in American Poetry Review, AGNl, Los Angeles Review of Books,The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Magazine, Tin House, and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the US. He was featured in Spotlight on Hispanic Writers, Library of Congress.

Lory Bedikian

Lory Bedikian’s first collection The Book of Lamenting was awarded the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she was awarded the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her work has been selected several times as a finalist in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition and has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and AFFMA. Poets & Writers chose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. Additionally, her poetry was included in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Beyond Baroque Books, 2015 and chosen as a finalist in the 2015 AROHO Orlando Competition. Bedikian’s newer work has been published in Miramar, has been featured on the Best American Poetry blog as part of the “Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body” series, is included in the Fall 2018 issue of Tin House and appears in recent issues of The Los Angeles Review and MORIA, as well as on Poets.org. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the recently released anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Knopf, 2020.

Joseph Millar

Joseph Millar’s first collection, Overtime, was a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, followed by a third, Blue Rust, in 2012. His latest collection Kingdom was released in early 2017.

Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University before spending 30 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work—stark, clean, unsparing—records the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorce.

He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA Program and in North Carolina State’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Michael Kleber-Diggs

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, will be published by Milkweed Editions in June, 2021. Michael’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Rain Taxi, Lit Hub, McSweeney’s, Poetry City, North Dakota Quarterly, Pollen Midwest, Paper Darts, Water~Stone Review, Midway Review, and a few anthologies. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African-America Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the former Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Jerome Foundation. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a B.F.A in Dance Performance and SUNY Purchase. 

Instagram: @mkdordiggsy

Danusha Laméris

Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She’s the author of Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), and the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Danusha teaches poetry independently, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.

Instagram: @dlameris

Jeffrey Perkins

Jeffrey Perkins published his first collection of poetry, Kingdom, with Spork Press in 2020. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and a 2019 artist-in-residence at the Watermill Center, his poems have appeared in many literary journals including The Massachusetts Review, The Cortland Review, The Adroit Journal, Rhino, Tupelo Quarterly, and Memorious, among others. He lives in Los Angeles.

Instagram: @jperkins44

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson

Originally from Los Angeles, Cherene Sherrard is a poet, scholar, and essayist. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Vixen (2017) and Grimoire (2020), both from Autumn House Press, and Mistress, Reclining—an award-winning chapbook. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have been published in The Rumpus, Plume, The New York Times Magazine, Verse Daily, The Journal, Terrain.org, Blackbird, Water~Stone Review, Prairie Schooner, and numerous other journals. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Malcolm Tariq

Malcolm Tariq is a poet and playwright from Savannah, Georgia. He is the author of Heed the Hollow (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2020 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry, and Extended Play (Gertrude Press, 2017). He was a 2016-2017 playwriting apprentice at Horizon Theatre Company (Atlanta, GA) and is a 2020-2021 resident playwright with Liberation Theatre Company (New York, NY). Malcolm is a graduate of Emory University and holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is the Programs and Communications Manager at Cave Canem, a home for Black poetry.

Instagram: @nowheresouth
Twitter: @MalcolmTariq

Erika Meitner

Erika Meitner is the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry and author of five books of poems: Holy Moly Carry Me; Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore; Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls; and Ideal Cities, which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; and Copia. Her poetry and prose have been widely anthologized. Born and raised in Queens and Long Island, NY, Meitner is a first-generation American: her father is from Israel; her mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany, which is where her maternal grandparents settled after surviving the Holocaust. Meitner is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing.

Instagram: @rika99

Carlos Andrés Gómez

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.

Instagram: @carlosaglive
Twitter: @CarlosAGLive

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker has published seventeen volumes of poetry, including The Volcano and After; Waiting for the Light; The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011; No Heaven; The Volcano Sequence; and The Imaginary Lover, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She was twice a National Book Award Finalist, for The Little Space (1998) and The Crack in Everything (1996), and twice a National Jewish Book Award winner. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Ostriker’s critical work includes the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on American poetry and on the Bible.

Sara Henning

Sara Henning is the author of View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Winner of the 2019 High Plains Book Award, it was short listed by Jacar Press for the 2018 Julie Suk Award. She is the recipient of the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams Scholarship, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry ​Award. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. Her work has also appeared in several notable anthologies, including South Dakota In Poems, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose,and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence. Henning teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she also serves as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

Twitter: @SaraDHenning

Dare Williams

A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Dare Williams is a Queer HIV-positive poet, artist, rooted in Southern California. He has received fellowships from John Ashbury Home School and The Frost Place. Dare’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a two-time finalist for Blood Orange Review’s contest. His work has been featured in Cultural Weekly, Bending Genres, THRUSH,  Exposition Review and elsewhere. He is currently at work on his first poetry collection. 

IG & Twitter: @Dare_Williams13

Seema Reza

Seema Reza is the author of the poetry collection A Constellation of Half-Lives (Write Bloody Publishing) and the memoir When the World Breaks Open (Red Hen Press). Seema has led writing workshops within correctional facilities, military and civilian hospitals, elementary and secondary schools, and universities. She is the CEO of Community Building Art Works, a unique arts organization that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization among a military population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. Reza’s work with veterans is featured in the 2018 HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet. She was awarded the Col John Gioia Patriot Award by the USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore for her work with service members. An alumnus of Goddard College and VONA, she has had writing online and in print in McSweeney’s, The LA Review, The Feminist Wire, The Offing, and Entropy among others. Case studies from her work with military populations have appeared in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Related Diseases in Combat Veterans. She has performed across the country at universities, theaters, festivals, bookstores, conferences, & one fine mattress shop.

IG: @seema_reza

Emma Trelles

Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for Foreword/Indies poetry book of the year. She is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock.  Her work has been anthologized in Verse Daily; Best American Poetry; Best of the Net; Grabbed; Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, and others.  Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Terrain’s Letter to America series; the South Florida Poetry Journal; SWWIM;  Zócalo Public Square; the Colorado Review; and Spillway.  A CantoMundo Fellow and a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, she teaches at Santa Barbara City College and curates the Mission Poetry Series.

IG: @emmatrelles

Tina Chang

Tina Chang, Brooklyn Poet Laureate, is the author of Half-Lit Houses (2004), Of Gods & Strangers (2011), and most recently Hybrida (2019) which was named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by NPR, Lit Hub, The Millions, Oprah magazine, Publisher’s Weekly and was named a New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy collection. She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). Chang is the director of Creative Writing at Binghamton University.

IG: @tinachang_poet

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.

IG: @carolynforche

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five collections of poetry: The Absurd Man; Roll Deep; Holding Company; Hoops; and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and in Best American Poetry. He served as guest editor of Best American Poetry in 2019. Jackson is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.

IG: @poetmajorjackson

Maya C. Popa

Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), which was a recipient of the North American Book Prize and a runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She is also the author of two chapbooks, both from the Diagram Chapbook Series: You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave (2018) and The Bees Have Been Canceled (2017). She is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She is director of creative writing at the Nightingale-Bamford school where she oversees visiting writers, workshops, and readings.She holds degrees from Oxford University, NYU, and Barnard College and is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of wonder in poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Danielle DeTiberus

Danielle DeTiberus lives in Charleston, SC, where she teaches creative writing at the Charleston School of the Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Academy of American Poets, Copper Nickel, Entropy, The Missouri Review, River Styx, Spoon River Poetry Review, Waxwing and elsewhere. She currently serves as the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Program Chair, bringing nationally renowned poets to Charleston for readings and seminars, and teaches poetry each summer at Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) voted a notable debut by Latinx Spaces and Latino Stories. His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Nation, Poetry, Southeast Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Currently, he is a Guest Editor for Frontier and Palette Poetry.

Instagram: @jose_hdz_dz

Yalie Kamara

Yalie Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer and a native of Oakland, California. She’s the author of A Brief Biography of My Name (Akashic Books/African Poetry Book Fund, 2018), which was included in New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tano) and When The Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017). Kamara was a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and the 2017 Brunel African Poetry Prize. Her poetry publications include The Poetry Society of America, The Adroit Journal,  Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, and Southern Indiana Review.  She has received fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, and The National Book Critics Circle. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Indiana University, Bloomington and is currently a doctoral student in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Cincinnati.

Instagram: @yaliesaweda

Kimberly Ann Priest

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications 2021), Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press, 2021), Still Life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP, 2018). She is an MFA graduate in Creative Writing from New England College, already holding an MA in English Language & Literature from Central Michigan University. A proud Michigan native, she has taught composition and creative writing courses for Michigan State University, Central Michigan University, and Alma College, and participated in local initiatives to increase awareness concerning sexual assault, survivorship, and healing through artistic expression. Her writing carefully observes the intersections of gender violence, narrative identities, embodiment, trauma, and environmental issues as well as survival, wildness, joy & grief. Her poetry has appeared in several literary journals including North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Borderlands, RELIEF, RiverSedge, The Meadow, and The Berkeley Poetry Review. She has received several Pushcart Prize nominations and is a winner of the Heartland Poetry Prize in the New Poetry from the Midwest Anthology by New American Press (2019). 

Instagram: @kimberlyannpriest.poet

Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger’s most recent book is Partial Genius, and her new poetry collection, Department of Elegy, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in early 2022. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Akron, and serves as poetry and poetics editor for the University of Akron Press. Her poems are forthcoming in Bennington Review, and stories are forthcoming in DIAGRAM. She is currently working on a flash fiction manuscript about the adventures of two graduate school roommates in late 1990s Chicago. 

Instagram: @marybid

Luke Johnson

Luke Johnson lives on the California Coast with his wife and three kids. His poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Thrush, Tinderbox, Cortland Review and elsewhere. He was a Finalist for the Pablo Neruda Award, and his chapbook :boys, released with Blue Horse Press in 2019. 

Instagram: @lukethepoet.ninja

Travis Chi Wing Lau

Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau is an assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His work is primarily focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture with research and teaching interests in literature and science, the history of medicine, and disability studies.

Travis has contributed to numerous publications dedicated to accessible public scholarship like Synapsis, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. He also regularly reviews collections of poetry for literary and arts journals like Up the Staircase Quarterly and Tupelo Quarterly.

Alongside his academic and public writing, he is also a poet who writes often about embodiment at the intersections of queerness and disability. His most recent chapbook,Paring, is available through Finishing Line Press.

Instagram: @travisclau

Mel Sherrer

Mel Sherrer (She/Her) is a writer, editor and educator. She is a proponent of women’s learning institutions having received her B.F.A. from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia and her M.F.A from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She is the Social Media Editor for South 85 Literary Journal, and she teaches Creative Writing and Performance Literature. A few of her recent publications appear in Recenter Press and Deep South Magazine. She has poetry forthcoming in MORIA Literary Journal, The Racket Journal, and Headmistress Press. She currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

James Jabar

James Jabar is a poet and lecturer from Greensboro, NC. He has an MFA in poetry from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His poems have appeared in The Freshwater Review and his new chapbook Whatever Happened To Black Boys? was recently published by Texas Review Press. 

Instagram: @jamesjabar

Sam Cha

Sam Cha was born in Korea, and earned an MFA at UMass Boston. A recipient of a 2017 St. Botolph’s Club Emerging Artist Award, he’s the author of a cross-genre collection, The Yellow Book ([PANK] Books, 2020), and a chapbook, American Carnage (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2018). Sam lives, works, and writes in Cambridge.

Kim Young

Kim Young is the author of Tigers (PANK Books, 2020) and Night Radio, winner of the 2011 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize (The University of Utah Press) and finalist for the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Divided Highway (Dancing Girl Press, 2008). She is the founding editor of Chaparral, an online journal featuring poetry from Southern California, and her poems and essays have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, TriQuarterly, POOL and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Instagram: @_kim_young_

Lynne Procope

Lynne Procope is a Trinidadian poet, Cave Canem fellow, National Poetry Slam champion, and a co-author of the collaborative collection, Burning Down the House. Her poems appear in journals, reviews, and anthologies across the hemisphere. She is the former editor of Union Station Magazine, a cofounder of the louderARTS Project, and creative director of the Lit Live Series.

Marina Carreira

Marina Carreira (she/her/hers) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Marina is a recipient of the Sundress Academy for the Arts Summer 2021 Residency fellowship. As a visual artist, she has exhibited her work at Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, and Living Incubator Performance Space {LIPS} in the Gateway Project Spaces in Newark, NJ.

Instagram: @savethebathwater

Jay Deshpande

Jay Deshpande is the author of The Umbrian Sonnets, newly released from PANK Books, as well as Love the Stranger and The Rest of the Body (both from YesYes Books). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Kundiman fellowship, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri and the Saltonstall Arts Colony. He teaches at Brooklyn Poets and Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Instagram: @jdeshpan

Ananda Lima

Ananda Lima’s poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming in 2021) won the 2020 Hudson Prize. She is also the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the Vella Chapbook Prize), Amblyopia (INCH #45, Bull City Press, 2020), and Tropicália (Newfound, forthcoming in 2021, winner of the Newfound Prose Prize). Her work has appeared or is upcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Sixth Finch, The Common, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, The Cortland Review,and elsewhere. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. 

Instagram: @anandalima

Mark Wunderlich

Mark Wunderlich is the author of God of Nothingness; The Earth Avails, winner of the Rilke Prize; Voluntary Servitude; and The Anchorage, winner of the Lambda Literary Award.

Mark has published individual poems in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Believer, The Paris Review, Slate, Yale Review, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. His work has been included in over forty anthologies and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. His work has been translated into Italian, Bulgarian, Spanish, German, Turkish and Swedish.

He teaches at Bennington College and lives in the Hudson Valley in New York.

Instagram: @mark_wunderlich

Sumita Chakraborty

Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she teaches in literary studies and creative writing. She is the recipient of fellowships and honors from the Poetry Foundation, the Forward Arts Foundation, and Kundiman. Her debut collection of poetry, Arrow, is out now from Alice James Books in the U.S. and Carcanet Press in the U.K., and has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian. 

Twitter: @notsumatra

Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey Harrison’s sixth full-length book of poetry, Between Lakes, was published by Four Way Books in September 2020. His previous book, Into Daylight, won the Dorset Prize and was published by Tupelo Press in 2014, while Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way, 2006) was runner-up for the Poets’ Prize, and his first book, The Singing Underneath, was a National Poetry Series selection in 1987. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and his poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize volumes, and been featured in American Life in Poetry, The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, and other online and media venues. He lives in Massachusetts.

Peter Schmitt

Peter Schmitt is the author of six books of poems, including four full-length collections: Goodbye, Apostrophe, published in 2020 by Regal House; Renewing the Vows (David Robert Books); Hazard Duty and Country Airport (Copper Beech).  Two chapbooks, To Disappear, and Incident in an Apartment Complex: A Suite of Voices, are with Pudding House.  He has received The Julia Peterkin Award (Converse College); The Lavan Award (Academy of American Poets); The “Discovery”/The Nation Prize; grants from The Florida Arts Council (twice); and an Ingram Merrill Fellowship.  His poems have appeared in many leading journals, including The Hudson Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review, are widely anthologized and have been featured on NPR’s Writers Almanac.  He lives and teaches in his hometown of Miami, Florida.

Kim Sousa

Kim Sousa is a Brazilian American poet and open border radical. She was born in Goiânia, Goiás and immigrated to Austin, Texas with her family at age five. Her poems can be found in Poet Lore, EcoTheo Review, The Boiler and elsewhere. Her first book of poems, ALWAYS A RELIC NEVER A RELIQUARY, is the winner of the Black Lawrence Press 2020 St. Lawrence First Book Prize (forthcoming July 2022). Kim is currently editing an anthology of LatinxFuturisms, Até Mais, with Alan Chazaro and Malcolm Friend.

Twitter: @kimsoandso and @LatinxFuturisms

Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections—Made to Explode, Count the Waves, I Was the Jukebox, which won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Theories of Falling—as well as Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir and cultural history of food allergies. She served as the editor for Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Honors for her work include the 2019 Munster Literature Centre’s John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, a 2015 NEA fellowship, and five DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Twitter & IG: @sandrabeasley

Alan Charazo

Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco. He’s a former high school teacher, is currently a creative writing adjunct professor in the Bay Area, and the co-founding editor of HeadFake, an online NBA zine.

Instagram: @alan_chazaro

Rodney Terich Leonard

Rodney Terich Leonard is the author of Sweetgum & Lightning (Four Way Books).  An Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, his society profiles and poems have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Red River Review, The Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, Poems in the Afterglow, What Rough Beast, Four Way Review, The New York Times, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys… (anthology edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. He holds degrees from The New School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Teachers College Columbia University. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and currently lives in Manhattan.

Kerry Trautman

Ohio born and raised, Kerry is a founder of ToledoPoet.com and the “Toledo Poetry Museum” page on Facebook, both of which serve to promote NW Ohio poetry events. She is a poetry editor for the online journal Red Fez. In 2015, one of her yet-to-be-published poetry collections was a finalist for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies Stevens Award, and was a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard Series 1^st Book Award. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in various anthologies and in journals such as Midwestern Gothic, Free State Review, Slippery Elm, and Hawaii Pacific Review. Kerry’s poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) and To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020.)

Instagram: @ohiokerry

Antoinette Brim-Bell

Antoinette Brim-Bell (Antoinette Brim), author of These Women You Gave Me, Icarus in Love, and Psalm of the Sunflower, is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry, memoir, and critical work has appeared in various journals and magazines, as well as, in anthologies including Villanelles, Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander, Critical Insights: Alice Walker, 44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the 44th President of the United States, Not A Muse, Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta, and The Whiskey of Our Discontent: an anthology of essays commemorating Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the 2017 Central New York Book Award for nonfiction. The Whiskey of Our Discontent is available on Audible. A printmaker and collage artist, Brim-Bell recently exhibited both poetry and monoprints in Jazz: An exhibition of Poetry, Prints, and Photography at the Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery in New Haven, CT, and Sheroes, in partnership with the Alliance of Women Veterans at the Grove in New Haven, CT. She serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors of Indolent Arts Foundation based in New York City, is a past Board Member of OneWorld Progressive Institute, and a past President of the Board of Directors of the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, CT. Additionally, Brim-Bell has hosted a series of Black History Month television programs for the OneWorld Progressive Institute and is a former guest host of Patrick Oliver’s Literary Nation Talk Radio (KABF 88.3, Little Rock) for which she interviewed a variety of entertainers, literary figures, political pundits and community developers. A sought-after speaker, editor, educator, and consultant, Brim-Bell is a Professor of English at Capital Community College.

Instagram: @antoinettebrimbell

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc. 

A new book of poems, Everything, will be published by Four Way Books in 2021. Other collections include Nightshade (Four Way, 2019). Unfathoming (Four Way, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999). 

Cohen has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

Timothy Liu

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Let It Ride. He is also the author of Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. 

Translated into ten languages, Liu’s poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. He is currently a Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

Liu is an intuitive reader of occult esoterica, including the Tarot and the I-Ching. He is available for readings at Mirabai in Woodstock, NY; at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY; and for private consultations.

Instagram: @liu_po

Mary Morris

Mary Morris lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of two books of poetry, Enter Water, Swimmer and most recently Dear October, both published by Texas Review Press. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Review, Arts & Letters, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, Rattle, as well as featured in Poetry Daily. She received the New Mexico Discovery Award, Western Humanities Review Mountain West Prize and the Rita Dove Award. Mary has read her poems for the Library of Congress and also aired on National Public Radio. 

Dilruba Ahmed

Dilruba Ahmed is the author Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry 2019, andpodcasts such as The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama.  Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize.  Ahmed’s poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares.Her poetry has also been anthologized in Literature: The Human Experience; Border Lines: Poems of Migration; The Orison Anthology 2020; and elsewhere.Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  Ahmed has taught with the MFA programs at Chatham University and Warren Wilson College.  She also teaches classes online with Hugo House and The Writing Lab. 

Instagram: @dilruba_ahmed20

Shira Erlichman

Shira Erlichman is a poet, musician, and visual artist. She was born in Israel and immigrated to the US when she was six. She earned her BA at Hampshire College. She is the winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, a Finalist for the Lambda Award and a Silver Medalist for the Nautilus Award. She has been awarded the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe, as well as a residency by the Millay Colony. Her work has been featured in PBS NewsHour’s Poetry Series, The Seattle Times, and The New York Times, among others. She is the author of Odes to Lithium and the author-illustrator of Be/Hold: A Friendship Book. She lives in Brooklyn where she runs Freer Form: A Portable Creativity School, connecting a global community of writers.

Instagram: @sheer_awe

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and writer living in Chicago. He is the author of three books of poetry, including most recently Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) which was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. His fourth poetry book, Madness, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2022. He is also the co-editor of a book of selected sketches by the artist Gustavo Ojeda, out from Soberscove Press in 2020. He is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Chicago where he works in the study of sexuality.

Instagram: @hadeejasouffle

Jody Chan

Jody Chan is a writer, drummer, organizer, and therapist based in Toronto. They are the author of haunt (Damaged Goods Press), all our futures (PANK), and sick, winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award. They can be found offline in bookstores or dog parks.

Instagram: @jodyjr.chan

Tyler French

Tyler French (he/him/his) is a writer and public humanist living in Washington, D.C. His first full-length book of poetry, He Told Me was published by Capturing Fire Press in 2019. He has writing in Impossible Archetype, Assaracus, Beech Street Review, Bending Genres Journal, Stoked Words, an anthology of queer poetry, and The Quarry, Split This Rock’s Social Justice Poetry Database. He is a co-creator and baker for Queer Cookies, a  poetry series and bake sale supporting LGBTQ+ poets.

Instagram: @thfrench

Jasmine Harris

Jasmine Harris is an educational specialist and award-winning author featured in the International Poetry Digest, Ink & Voices, Rigorous, and more. Harris is  currently learning and living in Arkansas. She’s a certified wordsmith with a hope to further equity in education and literature.

Author of, I May Have Been In My Feelings, focuses her writing on the diverse experiences and development of women and minorities. The collection of poetry details the diverse experiences of a woman on a journey of growth. 

Harris began writing during adolescence as a means to promote mental health. She also uses writing to capture the climate of society. Her writing is “soulful, feminine, and witty.” She perfects the process of modern emoting. Harris frequently quotes her inspirations as Maya Angelou, Ntozake Shange, and Tupac Shakur. She hopes to inspire and encourage the importance of self-care.

Instagram: @dr_harris

Chloe Martinez

Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020), which won the 2019 Backbone Press Chapbook Competition, and Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, forthcoming 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Waxwing, Shenandoah, The Common and elsewhere. She teaches at Claremont McKenna College. 

Instagram: @cmartinez314

Adrienne Su

Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, Middle Kingdom, Sanctuary, Having None of It, Living Quarters, and the latest Peach State (Pitt, March 2021, now). Her poems have been featured on websites such as Poetry Daily and Poem-a-Day and could turn up on your mobile device if you use the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry app. They also appear in anthologies such as The Hungry Ear; The New American Poets; Border Lines: Poems of Migration; Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation; Best American Poetry (2000, 2013, 2016, 2018, 2021); and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Su’s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Foundation grant, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, The Frost Place, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She studied at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges (AB, 1989) and the University of Virginia (MFA, 1993). Since 2000, she has taught creative writing at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is Poet-in-Residence.

Gustavo Hernandez

Gustavo Hernandez is the author of the poetry collection Flower, Grand, First (Moon Tide Press 2021). His work has previously been published in Rattle, Acentos Review, Sonora Review and other publications. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and lives in Southern California.

Instagram: @gus1679

celeste doaks

Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields, Wrecking Ball Press, UK, March 2015. She’s the editor (and contributor in) of poetry anthology Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Joy, and Sexuality, Mason Jar Press, May 2017. Cornrows was listed as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2015” by Beltway Quarterly Poetry. Her poem “For the Chef at Helios…” received a 2015 Pushcart Prize nomination. Her multiple accolades include a 2017 Rubys Grant in Literary Arts, a Lucille Clifton Scholarship to attend Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, the 2010 AWP WC&C Scholarship, and residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and QBR (Quarterly Black Book Review). Her poems have been published in multiple on-line and print publications such as Chicago Quarterly Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Bayou Magazine and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Her poems have also appeared in multiple anthologies including Misrepresented People: A Poetic Responses to Trump’s America, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, and Home Is Where: An Anthology of African American Poetry from the Carolinas.Celeste received her MFA from North Carolina State University; she is the 2017-2020 Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of Delaware.

Instagram: @thedoaksgirl

Brian Komei Dempster

Brian Komei Dempster’s second poetry collection, Seize, was published by Four Way Books in fall 2020. His debut book of poems, Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013), received the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry. Dempster is editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), which received a 2007 Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2011). He is a professor of rhetoric and language at the University of San Francisco, where he serves as Director of Administration for the Master’s in Asia Pacific Studies program. 

Jennifer Franklin

Jennifer Franklin has published two full-length collections, most recently No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her third book, If Some God Shakes Your House, will be published by Four Way Books in 2023. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, Love’s Executive Order, The Nation, Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem, “Memento Mori: Pistachios,” will be featured in Poetry Society of America’s “Poetry in Motion, RI” in February 2021. She teaches in the Manhattanville MFA program and the Hudson Valley Writers Center where she serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City. 

Instagram & Twitter: @jfranklinpoetry

Courtney LeBlanc

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart (forthcoming from Riot in Your Throat), and Beautiful & Full of Monsters (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press). She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning.

Instagram: @wordperv79
Twitter: @wordperv

Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of seven poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a collaboration with woodcut artist Charles D. Jones. Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Hungarian. Collections have been published in China, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, and the UK. Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her latest books are a poetry collection, Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton), and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). A new book of poems, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, was released on March 16, 2021.

Instagram: @kimaddonizio
Twitter: @kim_addonizio

Susan Landgraf

Susan Landgraf was awarded a Poets Laureate grant from the Academy of American Poets in 2020. Two Sylvias Press published The Inspired Poet, a writing book of prompts with poems from 69 poets, in 2019. More than 400 poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Margie, Nimrod, and others. Other books include What We Bury Changes the Ground and Other Voices. She taught at Highline College for 30 years and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She’s given more than a hundred and fifty workshops, most recently the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and served as Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, from 2018 through 2020.

Stephanie Rogers

Stephanie Rogers is the author of Plucking the Stinger and the forthcoming collection, Fat Girl Forms, both published by Saturnalia Books. She grew up in Middletown, Ohio, the same steel town portrayed in the book and Netflix drama, Hillbilly Elegy. She was educated at The Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She lives outside of Nashville in Lebanon, TN.

Instagram: @stephanierogerspoet

Kelly Grace Thomas

Kelly Grace Thomas is an ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is a self-taught poet, editor, educator and author. Kelly is the winner of the 2020 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and  2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, released with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Nashville Review, Muzzle, DIAGRAM, and more. Kelly currently works as the Director of Education for Get Lit-Words Ignite, a poetry nonprofit. Kelly is a three-time poetry slam championship coach and the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot), currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Kelly has received fellowships from Tin House Winter Workshop, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Young Writers. Kelly and her sister, Kat Thomas, won Best Feature Length Screenplay at the Portland Comedy Film Festival for their romantic comedy, Magic Little Pills. Kelly lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Omid, and is currently working on her debut novel, a YA thriller, titled Only 10,001.

Instagram: @kellygracethomas
Twitter: @kellygracethoma

Wren Hanks

Wren Hanks is the author of Lily-livered, winner of Driftwood Press’s 2020 Adrift Chapbook Contest, and The Rise of Genderqueer (Brain Mill Press, 2018). A 2016 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellow, his recent work appears or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Third Coast, New South, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, where he works in pet and wildlife rescue.  

Instagram: @reallytrulyashark
Twitter: @suitofscales

Melissa Fite Johnson

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of Green (forthcoming, Riot in Your Throat). She holds a BSEd in English and an MA in creative writing and literature from Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Recent and forthcoming publications include Pleiades, SWWIM, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Stirring, Broadsided Press, Whale Road Review, Ruth + Moth, Rise Up Review, Sidereal, One, Midwest Quarterly, Chiron Review,and elsewhere. Her first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), and her collaboration with three other Kansas writers, Ghost Sign (Spartan Press, 2016), were both named Kansas Notable Books. She is also the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Melissa and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, Kansas, where she teaches high school English.

Twitter: @MFiteJohnson

Addie Tsai

Addie Tsai is a queer, nonbinary writer and artist of color who lives and teaches Creative Writing, Dance, Humanities, and Literature in Houston, Texas. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and her PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. She is the author of the young adult novel, Dear Twin. Addie is a staff writer at Spectrum South, Assistant Fiction Editor at Anomaly, and the Founding Editor and co-Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy. 

Instagram: @bluejuniper
Twitter: @addiebrook