Contributors
Abigail Carl-Klassen
Abigail Carl-Klassen’s work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Guernica, Huizache, and Post Road, among others, and is anthologized in New Border Voices (Texas A&M University Press) Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance (Texas Review Press) and Outrage: A Protest Anthology for Injustice in a 9/11 World (Slough Press). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2015. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing Program and taught at El Paso Community College and the University of Texas El Paso. Before becoming a college instructor she worked in community development and in the El Paso public schools.
Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books of include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California.
Adriana E. Ramírez
Ramírez won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her nonfiction novella, “Dead Boys” (available as a Kindle single from Little A). A nonfiction writer, storyteller, digital maker, critic and performance poet based in Pittsburgh, she is working on her first full-length book, “The Violence” (forthcoming from Scribner).
Aracelis González Asendorf
Aracelis González Asendorf was born in Cuba. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Brevity Magazine, Kweli Journal, The Adirondack Review, Puerto del Sol, The Acentos Review, Litro, The South Atlantic Review, Saw Palm, Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Hong Kong Review, The Santa Fe Literary Review and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, 100% Pure Florida Fiction, and Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness. She is the recipient of the 2016 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Graduate Creative Writing Award for Prose, a 2019 Sterling Watson fellow, and 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize finalist.
Aisha Durham
Aisha Durham is a cultural studies scholar. Durham uses auto/ethnography, performance writing, and intersectional approaches honed in Black feminist cultural criticism to analyze representations of Black womanhood in hip hop media. Recent work on Black womanhood is featured in her new book, Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture. This book extends earlier discussions about hip hop culture, media representations, and the body in her co-edited volumes, Home Girls Make Some!: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method & Policy. Durham’s cultural criticism has been featured in popular news media and sites, such as The New Yorker, Haaretz, Crunk Feminist Collective, NewBlackMan, and Ms. Magazine.
Aldrin Valdez
Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy writer and visual artist. They grew up in Manila and Long Island and currently live in Brooklyn. Aldrin has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship and Poets House. Their poetry & visual art appear in The Felt, Femmescapes, Nat Brut, Poor Claudia, and The Recluse. Aldrin has also presented work at Dixon Place, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Poetry Project. Collaborating with writer & organizer Ted Kerr, Aldrin co-organized Foundational Sharing (2011-2015), a salon series of readings, performances, & visual art. Most recently, they’ve co-curated two seasons of the Segue Reading Series with fellow poet Joël Díaz.
Alejandro Varela
Alejandro Varela (he/him) is based in New York. His work has appeared in the Boston, Yale, and Georgia Reviews, The Point Magazine, Harper’s, and the Offing, among other publications. His debut novel, The Town of Babylon (Astra House, 2022) was a finalist for the National Book Award. His short story collection, The People Who Report More Stress (Astra, 2023), is one of Publishers Weekly’s best works of fiction in 2023, a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards, and longlisted for the Aspen Literary Prize. Varela is an editor-at-large of Apogee Journal, and he holds a masters in public health from the University of Washington
Alexandria Delcourt
Alexandria Delcourt received her MFA from the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program in 2014. She is currently a Lecturer in the Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her work has been used in dance performances, read and taught internationally, and has appeared in Written River, Poetry Quarterly, As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, Kalyani Magazine, FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, and other publications. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, a prayer poet priestess and has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Alexis is a founder of Brilliance Remastered, a service to help visionary underrepresented graduate students stay connected to purpose, passion and community, co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, a national experiential archive amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ Brilliance, and the community school Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind. Alexis was named one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World in 2009, was awarded a Too Sexy for 501-C3 trophy in 2011 and is one of the Advocate’s top 40 under 40 features in 2012.
Allison Adrian
Allison Adrian is an ethnomusicologist, particularly interested in the relationships between music and community building. She is currently Assistant Professor of Music, Women’s Studies and Critical Studies of Race & Ethnicity at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN. She was recently awarded a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellowship to study indigenous music in Southern Ecuador. She is co-editing Voicing Girlhood in Popular Culture: Music, Performance, Activism with Jacqueline Warwick, a critical anthology to be published in the Routledge Series in Popular Music.
Amina Gautier
Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy and the The Loss of All Lost Things. At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award, The First Horizon Award, and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction Award. Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the International Latino Book Award, the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President's Book Award, a National Silver Medal IPPY Award and was a Finalist for the William Saroyan Prize. Her newest collection The Loss of All Lost Things was awarded the Elixir Prize in Fiction, The Chicago Public Library Foundation's 21st Century Award, the Royal Palm Literary Award, the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President's Book Award, was a Finalist for the Paterson Prize, and is a Finalist for an IndieFab Award. Ninety-five of Gautier’s stories have been published, appearing in Agni, Best African American Fiction, Callaloo, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New Stories from the South, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and StoryQuarterly among other places. Her fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Callaloo, The Camargo Foundatio, the Château de Lavigny, Dora Maar, Disquiet International, Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers; Hurston/Wright Foundation, Kimbilio, MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Ucross Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center.
Amira Plascencia Vela
Amira Plascencia-Vela is an independent translator and researcher. She has taught Spanish Language and Translation at college level in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. She has translated Children’s Books from English into Spanish; “Rhyme and Reason” is her first attempt to translate a literary work from Spanish into English. She has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Houston.
Amy Elizabeth Bishop
Amy Elizabeth Bishop works as a literary agent at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. Her poetry has or will appear in Gandy Dancer, The Susquehanna Review, Dialogist, and H_NGM_N. She lives in Queens and you can find her on Twitter at @amylizbishop or on Instagram at @aeb.books.
Amy Sara Carroll
Amy Sara Carroll’s books include SECESSION; FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography, chosen by Claudia Rankine for the 2012 Poets Out Loud Prize; and REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era which received honorable mentions for the 2017 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, the 2018 Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities, and the 2019 Association for Latin American Art-Arvey Foundation Book Award. Since 2008, she has been a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool. She coauthored [({ })] The Desert Survival Series/La serie de sobrevivencia del desierto which was published under a Creative Commons license and widely redistributed. Carroll was a 2017-2018 Fellow in Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and a 2018-2019 Fellow in the University of Texas at Austin’s Latino Research Initiative. Winter 2021, she was an artist-in-residence with other members of EDT 2.0 at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Fall 2022, Mexico City’s Centro de Cultura Digital included her chapbook ¡NIFTY! [an intimate oral history/una historia oral íntima] in the exhibition catalog for Cuánto tiempo lleva todo esto derramándose sin desbordarse. Previously she taught at The New School in New York City, currently she’s an Associate Professor of Literature and Writing at the University of California, San Diego.
Ana-Maurine Lara
Ana-Maurine Lara's poetry and short fiction has appeared in several literary journals including Blithe House Quarterly, The Encyclopedia Project, Sable LitMag and Torch Magazine. She has received awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Puffin Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council and PEN Northwest. Her debut novel, Erzulie's Skirt, was selected as a Lambda Literary finalist in 2006; her second (unpublished) novel, Anacaona's Daughter, won Third Place Prize in the National Latino/Chicano Literary Prizes. Ana-Maurine is a Cave Canem Fellow and a member of The Austin Project, a collaborative workshop between artists, activists and scholars out of UT-Austin. She coordinates an oral history project documenting the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender artists titled: We are the Magicians, the Path Breakers and the Dream Makers (http://themagicmakers.blogspot.com/) and is also co-author of bustingbinaries.com: a website dedicated to addressing binary thinking in U.S. based social justice movements. She is a graduate of Harvard University. Currently she resides in Austin, TX. Check out her website www.zorashorse.com and Blogspot: http://zorashorse.blogspot.com/ Visit: http://www.myspace.com/zorashorse To view a short reading from debut novel: Erzulie's Skirt - A Novel
Andrea Juele
Andrea Juele writes nonfiction and poetry in the New York metro area. Her work moves between the natural world, the ethereal, and the comically mundane, finding wonder in the everyday. She is currently working on a book-length project evoking family and home in The Philippines via memories of food. When not writing, she interns at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and works full-time at an NYC steakhouse—both places where she finds inspiration for her stories about family and memorable meals.
Andrée Greene
Andrée Greene is a graduate of Cornell (BA) and Columbia (MFA, fiction) Universities. She lives in New York City where she teaches creative writing, is a freelance editor, and recently completed her novel, *Nobody's Doll*.
Ángela Hernández Nuñez
Ángela Hernández Nuñez was born in Buena Vista, Jarabacoa, in May 1954. A chemical engineer with a degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, she found her true vocation in literature. She is a poet, short story writer and novelist, and has written numerous essays on women and literature. She is also passionate about cinema and photography. She has won several awards and is a member of the Dominican Academy of Language.
Angie Cruz
Angie Cruz's novel, DOMINICANA is the inaugural bookpick for GMA book club, and the Wordup Uptown Reads selection for 2019. It was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie award in excellence in fiction for 2019. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee. She's the founder and Editor-in-chief of the award winning literary journal, Aster(ix)and an Associate professor at University of Pittsburgh where she teaches in the MFA program. She splits her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Turin.
Ani Kazarian
Ani Kazarian writes essays, short stories, and screenplays, and is at work on her first novel. Her research interests include literature, culture, history, and trauma. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.
Anthony Morales
Anthony Morales is a writer/educator from the Bronx who has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry and toured the US and Puerto Rico. He is a VONA alum and facilitator of La SOPA workshops in NYC. He has been an English teacher in public schools for 15 years. He has published Story Avenue (2005) Chevere Cafre (2007) dice queso (2010) Hood Night (2011) So Far (2015) and soon to be released Ponerme Yo (2016). He still writes by the chessboard benches in Clason Point Gardens. He can be found at various cyphers and open mics and conferences spitting his Nuyorican Ghetto Gospels for the blocks, hoods, goons, goblins, and illiterati alike. Check him out at anthonymorales.blogspot.com.
Antonio C. La Pastina
Brazilian born Antonio C. La Pastina worked as a journalist in Sao Paulo before moving to the United States in the late 1980s. He is currently an associate professor of media studies at Texas A&M University. He researches and writes on media ethnography, telenovelas, the representation of marginalized groups and contemporary art.
Anzhelina Polonskaya
Russian writer Anzhelina Polonskaya is the author of eight poetry collections and one short story collection, published between 1994 and 2013. Her work has been shortlisted for the 2005 Corneliu Popescue Prize for European Poetry in Translation, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. She is a member of the Moscow Union of Writers and the Russian PEN Centre. She was forced to flee her country after Russian nationalists attacked her for her poetic contribution to an oratorio requiem for the KURSK submarine disaster, a taboo subject in Russia. Anzhelina Polonskaya is the current ICORN writer-in-residence of the City of Refuge in Frankfurt, Germany.
Araceli Esparza
Araceli Esparza writes bilingual-bicultural picture books in between parenting, teaching and saving words for later. Follow her @WI_MUJER for diverse literature news and bookish things.
Ariana Brown
Ariana Brown is an Afromexicana poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2014 collegiate national poetry slam champion. An alum of Brave New Voices, Ariana's work has been featured in PBS, Huffington Post, Blavity, For Harriet, and Remezcla. Ariana, who has been dubbed a "part-time curandera" has performed across the U.S. at venues such as the San Antonio Guadalupe Theater, University of California - Santa Cruz, Tucson Poetry Festival, and the San Francisco Opera Theatre. When she is not onstage, she is probably eating an avocado, listening to the Kumbia Kings, or validating black girl rage in all its miraculous forms. Her work is published or forthcoming in Nepantla, Huizache, Rattle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets from Arte Público Press. She is currently earning an MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. Find more of her work at www.arianabrown.com and on social media @arianathepoet.
Arielle Greenberg
Arielle Greenberg’s newest books are the poetry collection Slice and the creative nonfiction work Locally Made Panties. She is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic, and co-editor of three anthologies, including the forthcoming Electric Gurlesque, co-edited with Becca Klaver. Arielle writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review, edits the series (K)ink: Writing While Deviant for The Rumpus, and lives in Maine. She teaches in the community and in Oregon State University-Cascades’ MFA.
Armando García
Armando García is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He is completing his first book, Impossible Indians: The Native Subjects of Decolonial Performance, a study of theatre, performance and the consolidation of race from the colony to the present.
Aubrey Hirsch
Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a short story collection. Her stories, essays and comics have appeared in The Florida Review, American Short Fiction, the New York Times and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at www.aubreyhirsch.com and follow her on Twitter @aubreyhirsch.
Audrey Peterson
Audrey Peterson is a writer and editor, and the former editor of American Legacy, the magazine of African-American history and culture. She is completing a family memoir about her German and African-American roots that includes the search for the truth about her grandfather, a German officer in World War II, and the lynching of a young man in Alabama, who may or may not have been her relative. Audrey lives in New York City and works in the communications department at Brooklyn College.
Aurora Masum-Javed
Aurora Masum-Javed is a poet, performer, and educator. She is currently completing her MFA in poetry at Cornell. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Jaggery, So to Speak, and Callaloo. She was recently a fellow at the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop.
Ayde Enriquez-Loya
Chicana born and raised on the border between Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Earned PhD in English with an emphasis on Cultural Rhetorics and Literatures of Color from Texas A&M University in 2012. Currently teaches courses in Composition, Cultural Rhetorics, Technical Writing, and Business & Professional Writing. Publications include, "The Calmécac Collective, or, How to Survive the Academic Industrial Complex through Radical Indigenous Practice." El Mundo Zurdo 3: Selected Works from the Meetings of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa. Eds. Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Larissa Mercado-López, Antonia Castañeda. San Francisco: Aunt Lute (2013).
Ayse Papatya Bucak
Ayşe Papatya Bucak teaches in the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University. Her prose has been published in a variety of magazines, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, and The Rumpus. Her short fiction has been selected for the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes. She is a contributing editor for the literary journal Copper Nickel.
Aysel Basci
Aysel K. Basci is a nonfiction writer and literary translator. She was born and raised in Cyprus and moved to the United States in 1975. Aysel is retired and resides in the Washington DC area. Her work appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Entropy, Bosphorus Review of Books and elsewhere.
Belle Boggs
Belle Boggs is the author of The Gulf: A Novel; The Art of Waiting; and Mattaponi Queen: Stories. The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Orion, the Paris Review, Harper's, Ecotone, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she also directs the MFA program in creative writing.
bell hooks
bell hooks, noted cultural critic, commentator, and feminist, is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she has chosen the lower case pen name bell hooks, based on the names of her mother and grandmother, to emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is. She is the author of over thirty books, many of which have focused on issues of social class, race, and gender. In 2013, she published the award-winning poetry collection Appalachian Elegy and Writing Beyond Race.
Birgul Oğuz
Birgül Oğuz, a fiction and nonfiction writer from Turkey, was among the winners of the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature for her latest short fiction collection Hah (2012), now being translated into thirteen languages. A PhD candidate in English Literature at Bosphorus University, she lectures on literature at independent academic institutions and theater houses in Istanbul.
Brian Bwesigye
Ugandan Brian Bwesigye studied Law at Makerere University and was until recently an LLM (Human Rights) student at Central European University- Budapest. He is co-founder of the Centre for African Cultural Excellence (CACE), which seeks to harness the abilities of African writers and artists in using culturally-grounded narratives to bring social change.
Brit Bennett
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. Her debut novel, The Mothers, was released in 2016.
Bushra Rehman
Bushra Rehman is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and author of Corona, a dark comedy about being Pakistani-American. Her poetry collection Marianna’s Beauty Salon has been described as "a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving.” Her next novel Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, the story of a queer Muslim teenager growing up in NYC, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books in 2022.
Caitlyn Christensen
Caitlyn Christensen is Associate Editor for Sampsonia Way. She studied Writing and History at the University of Pittsburgh. Caitlyn began working with Sampsonia Way in 2011 as an editorial intern, and joined the magazine’s staff in 2014.
Carina Valle Schorske
Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, essayist, and Spanish language translator at large in New York City. Her work has appeared at the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker online, Lit Hub, The Point, The New York Times Magazine, The Offing, The Awl, and elsewhere. She recently won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize for her translations of the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma. She is the happy recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, and Columbia University, where she is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. Find her @fluentmundo on Twitter.
Carley Moore
Carley Moore is an essayist, novelist, and poet. Her debut collection of essays, 16 Pills, was published in May of 2018 by Tinderbox Editions. Her debut novel, The Not Wives, is forthcoming from the Feminist Press in the fall of 2019. In 2017, she published her first poetry chapbook, Portal Poem (Dancing Girl Press) and in 2012, she published a young adult novel, The Stalker Chronicles (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). She lives in New York City and teaches at NYU and Bard College. Visit her website or follow her on Twitter.
Caro De Robertis
A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of six novels, including the forthcoming The Palace of Eros; The President and the Frog, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and Cantoras, winner of a Stonewall Book Award. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize. De Robertis is also an award-winning translator of Latin American literature, and a professor at San Francisco State University. They live in Oakland, California with their two children.
Carole Elizabeth Boyce Davies
who is currently professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. In 2017, she received The Franz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of Universities and is the author or editor of thirteen (13) books most recently Caribbean Spaces (2013) and the 3-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora She serves on the International Scientific Committee of UNESCO General History of Africa, Volume 9. She has lectured on Black Women’s Writings and Experience, Black Left Feminism, African Diaspora issues, at major colleges and universities in Brazil, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, India and China. She has held visiting professorships at University of Brasilia, Brazil, Beijing Foreign Studies University, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. As Director of African New World Studies at Florida International University, she developed the Florida Africana Studies Consortium and served on the Commissioner of Education’s Task Force for Implementing the Florida Mandate for the Teaching of African American experience. She has been president of major academic organizations such as the African Literature Association and Caribbean Studies Association.
Carolina Gonzalez
Carolina González is a recovering journalist and academic who keeps wanting to get back to the dissolute bohemian life she imagined for herself after she saw Jean-Jacques Beineix's film Diva in 1981. With Seth Kugel, she co-wrote the guidebook Nueva York: The Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs (St. Martin's Press, 2006). She never quite lost the 20 pounds she gained tasting street tamales and Cuban sandwiches for the book. Currently, she works in communications for the union SEIU Local 32BJ, and continues to work independently on storytelling and radio projects. "Tía Milena/Milena Tía" was originally written in 2007. Milena is now nine years old.
Caroline Cabrera
Caroline Cabrera is the author of the lyric essay collection, (lack begins as a tiny rumble) from Tinderbox Editions, as well as three poetry collections and two chapbooks, including most recently The Coma of the Comet from Burnside Review and Saint X from Black Lawrence Press. She is the Education Coordinator & Managing Editor at O, Miami. She is founder and editor of Bloom Books and cohost of the arts advice podcast Now that We’re Friends. You can find her online at carolinecabrera.work
Amaris Castillo
Amaris Castillo is a Brooklyn-born journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the Lowell Sun, Remezcla, Latina Magazine, Parents Latina Magazine, and elsewhere. Her creative writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms be Like..., Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology, and is forthcoming in Sana Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, "El Don," was a finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival and her short story, “The Moon and the Sun,” was longlisted in 2021. Amaris currently lives in Florida with her family. You can follow her on Instagram @amariswriter and read her stories from the colmado at bodegastories.com.
Catalina Bartlett
Catalina Bartlett is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. Her writing has appeared in Aster(ix): A Journal of Art, Criticism, and Literature, and A Walk Along the River: A Literary Anthology from the Upper Rio Grande. She has been awarded an ART OMI Ledig House Fellowship and an artist residency at Prairie Center for the Arts. Currently, she lives in Lansing, Michigan where she is at work on a short story collection that draws on her matrilineal family history and early life along the southern Colorado-northern New Mexico corridor.
Cathy Guo
Cathy Guo is a student and writer working on her first chapbook project funded by Columbia University, which aims to present oral history and poetry together in a dialogue on memory, landscape and diaspora in modern Chinese history.
Cathy Park Hong
Cathy Park Hong’s book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings, was published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House and Profile Books (UK). Minor Feelings is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo'um. Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her prose and poetry have been published in the New York Times, New Republic, the Guardian, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a full professor at Rutgers-Newark University.
Cecca Austin Ochoa
Cecca Austin Ochoa is a queer fiction writer of Salvadoran descent. Her fiction has appeared in Art XX, MAKE: Literary Magazine, Nat. Brut, Anthologized in Pariahs (SFA Press) and forthcoming in IMANIMAN (Aunt Lute Press). Cecca serves as Managing Editor for Apogee Journal. She is a 2014 Alumnus of Voices of Our Nation's Artists. In 2011, she received the Astraea Foundation’s Lesbian Writers Award. She is currently at work on her first novel Desaparecida about a young woman adopted during the Civil War in El Salvador and raised in the United States.
Celeste Prince
Celeste Prince, originally from Colorado, graduated from the University of Houston's MFA fiction program in 2013. In the past, she has attended the Callaloo Writers' Workshop and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, as well as taught creative writing to middle and high school students. Currently she lives with her cat in St. Louis, MO, teaching high school English.
Carolyn Ferrell
Carolyn Ferrell is the author of Dear Miss Metropolitan, which was recently shortlisted for both the PEN Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her first book, a short-story collection Don’t Erase Me, was awarded the 1997 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Ferrell’s stories and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2018, edited by Curtis Sittenfeld and Roxane Gay, respectively; The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike; Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor; Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, edited by Lise Funderburg; and other places. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Fulbright Association, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Bronx Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Sarah Lawrence College. Since 1996, she has been a faculty member in both the undergraduate and MFA writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York.
Champa Bilwakesh
Champa Bilwakesh was born in India, earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, Monsoon Magazine, Sugar Mule, and India Current where it won prizes in the Katha contest. Her story “The Boston Globe Personal Line” was nominated for the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, received honorable mention in the 2007 edition of Pushcart Prize, and has been translated into Italian for the online magazine, El-Ghibli. She lives in Andover, MA, where she produces TV shows for the community channel.
Charles Rice Gonzalez
Charles Rice-González, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time community and LGBTQ activist, co-founder of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Hostos Community College – City University of New York. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His debut novel Chulito (Magnus Books 2011) has received nearly a dozen awards including a 2013 Stonewall Book Awards - Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor from the American Library Association and a "Small Press Highlights" mention from the National Book Critics Circle. He co-edited From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Tincture/Lethe Press 2011). He’s the chair of the board for The Bronx Council on the Arts and The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and serves on the Macondo Writing Workshop’s Advisory board.
Chaya Nautiyal Murali
Chaya Murali is a pediatric geneticist and personal essayist living in Houston. Her work has appeared in Crack the Spine and Entropy, and her essay Bits and Pieces was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. She attended the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in 2018. Chaya writes about identity, inheritance, family, and genetics. She loves cooking, hates cilantro, and can be found musing on food and culture at instagram.com/akkashouse
Chika Unigwe
Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria. She is the author of four novels, including On Black Sisters Street (2009, 2011 Jonathan Cape, UK and Random House NY) and Night Dancer (Jonathan Cape, 2012). Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Guernica, Aeon and many other journals. Her works have been translated into several languages. A recipient of several awards and fellowships, she has recently been awarded a teaching position at Brown University, Rhode Island.
Chinelo Okparanta
Born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Chinelo Okparanta received her BS from Pennsylvania State University, her MA from Rutgers University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. A Colgate University Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Fiction as well as a recipient of the University of Iowa's Provost's Postgraduate Fellowship in Fiction, Okparanta was nominated for a US Artists Fellowship in 2012. She has been awarded additional fellowships, faculty appointments, and visiting professorships at Columbia University, Purdue University, Middlebury College (Bread Loaf's John Gardner Fellow in Fiction), Howard University (Hurston/Wright Foundation Summer Writing Workshop Fiction Faculty), City College of New York, and the University of Houston (Distinguished Visiting Professor of Fiction). She has been awarded residencies by the Jentel Foundation, the Hermitage Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation (Marfa), as well as Hedgebrook. She was Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing (Fiction) at Bucknell University, where she was also C. Graydon & Mary E. Rogers Faculty Research Fellow as well as Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professor in Poetry & Creative Writing until 2021. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in Creative Writing at Swarthmore College.
Christina Cooke
Born in Jamaica, Christina Cooke lives and writes in New York City. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former MacDowell fellow. Her work has or will appear in The Caribbean Writer, PRISM international, Epiphany: A Literary Journal, and Prairie Schooner, among others.
Christina Olivares
Christina Olivares is the author of No Map of the Earth Includes Stars, winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, of the chaplet Interrupt, published by Belladonna* Series, and of DSM/Partial Manual, winner of the 2014 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Competition . She is the recipient of a 2015-2016 LMCC Workspace Residency, two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants (2010 and 2014), a 2008 Teachers and Writers Fellowship, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Christine Tucker
Christine McDowell Tucker is a writer, painter, and retired clinical psychologist from Charlottesville, Va. She is the author of a short story collection entitled e End, and is nishing her debut novel, Family Systems.
Christopher Carmona
Christopher Carmona was the inaugural writer-in-residence for the Langdon Review Writers Residency Program in 2015. His story, ³Strange Leaves,² was the third finalist in the Texas Observer Short Story Contest of 2014. He was also a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2013. He has been published in numerous journals and magazines including Trickster Literary Journal, Interstice, vandal., Bordersenses, & the Sagebrush Review. His first collection of short stories entitled, The Road to Llorona Park was published by Stephen F. Austin University Press in 2016. He has recently edited an anthology called Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World for Slough Press and was a co-editor for The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writing. He was also co-author for a scholarly conversation book entitled Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Identities and he has two collections of poetry: beat and I Have Always Been Here. Finally, he is the Artistic Director of the Coalition of New Chican@ Artists.
Amanda Tien
Amanda Tien is a writer, artist, and marketing strategist, currently working on her first novel while pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has been published in Salt Hill Journal, Public Books, Poets.org, Call Me [Brackets], Columbia College Today, and The Punished Backlog. She is the 2021-2023 Managing Editor for transnational feminist literary journal Aster(ix). She holds a BA from Columbia University where she co-founded Culinarian, a magazine connecting student life to the world of food and drink in New York City. Her work can be viewed at www.amandatien.com
Clarissa A. León
Clarissa A. León is the Managing Editor for Aster(ix) Journal.
Cleyvis Natera
Cleyvis Natera is the author of the forthcoming debut novel Neruda on the Park which will be published May 2022 by Penguin Random House. She’s a Dominican immigrant who grew up in New York City. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from New York University. Her essays, short stories and criticism have most recently appeared in Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration, as well as in Time Magazine, Gagosian Quarterly, The Washington Post, The Kenyon Review, Asterix and Kweli Journal, among other publications. Cleyvis teaches Creative Writing in NYC and lives with her husband and two young children in Montclair, NJ. Follow her on Instagram @Cleyvis Natera
Chioma Iwunze-Ibiam
Chioma Iwunze-Ibiam, an MFA student in Cornell University's Creative Writing program, writes fiction that explores the convergence of fate and freewill. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asterix Journal, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Flash Fiction Press, Fiction 365, Ebedi Review Anthology and elsewhere. She lives in Ithaca, NY. You can connect with her via twitter @ChiomaIwunze_
Cody Stetzel
Cody Stetzel is a poet from Upstate New York. He spent two years suffering in the heatstroke wasteland of northern California and all he received was an MA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis. He has since been a staff reviewer for Glass Poetry Press. Now he's in the pacific northwest because there's no better way to embrace struggle than to sit outside in the rain. He sincerely hopes you're having a good day. Previous publications can be found in Neovox and the East Coast Literary Review.
Courtney Desiree Morris
Courtney Desiree Morris is an assistant professor of African American and Women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University and studies Black women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. She received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on Afro-Nicaraguan women’s political activism since the Sandinista Revolution and she is currently completing a book on this research. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship and a Fulbright.
Courtney Faye Taylor
Courtney Faye Taylor is a writer, visual artist, and the author of Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022). The collection was awarded the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was named a finalist for the NAACP Image Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and other honors. Courtney lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Criselda Santos Guevara
Criseida Santos-Guevara is a México-U.S border writer. She received Honorable Mention in the Binational Young Novel Frontera de Palabras / Border of Words Award in 2008 with Rhyme & Reason (Conaculta 2008). Also, she is the winner of the 2013 Literal Novel Prize with La reinita pop no ha muerto / The Little Queen of Pop in not Dead (Conaculta / Literal Publishing 2013).She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. She is currently studying Hispanic Studies with an emphasis on creative writing at the University of Houston.
Cristina García
Cristina García is the author of seven novels, including: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, and, most recently, Here in Berlin.
Cynthia Manick
Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Poets House, and the Vermont Studio Center. She serves as East Coast Editor of Jamii Publishing and is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day Series, African American Review, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Sou’wester, Pedestal Magazine, Tidal Basin, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Cynthia Dewi Oka
Cynthia Dewi Oka is a poet and author of Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). A Pushcart Prize Nominee, her poems have appeared online and in print, including in Guernica, Black Renaissance Noire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Dusie, The Wide Shore, The Collapsar, Apogee, Kweli, As Us Journal, Obsidian, and Terrain.org. She is also a contributor the anthologies Read Women (Locked Horn Press, 2014), Dismantle (Thread Makes Blanket, 2014), and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (PM Press, 2016). Cynthia has been awarded the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry, scholarships from the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) Writing Workshop and Vermont Studio Center, and the Art and Change Grant from Leeway Foundation. An immigrant from Bali, Indonesia, she is now based in South Jersey/Philly. Her second poetry collection is forthcoming in 2017 from Northwestern University Press.
Douglas Kearney
Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). A librettist, Kearney has had four operas staged, most recently Sweet Land, which received rave reviews from The LA Times, The NY Times, and The LA Weekly. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. A Howard University and CalArts alum, Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul.
Daisy Hernández
Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, which won the 2022 PEN /Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. She is also the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. She is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University.
Daniel Alarcón
Daniel Alarcón hails from Lima, Peru. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.
Danni Quintos
Danni Quintos is a Kentuckian, a mom, an educator, and an Affrilachian Poet. She received her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. Her work has appeared in Day One, Pluck!, Best New Poets 2015, Anthropoid, Salon, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her knitting has appeared on the shoulders and heads of many writers and artists, who are also friends and teachers. Danni is the author of PYTHON (Argus House, 2017), an ekphrastic chapbook featuring photography by her sister, Shelli Quintos.
Darise JeanBaptiste
Darise JeanBaptiste is inspired by the Black women who raised her in the Bronx and St. Lucia. Currently living in Brooklyn and working in the social impact sector, she earned her MFA from Rutgers-Newark and her MA in English literature from Brooklyn College. Darise is a VONA and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop alum. Her work is forthcoming at Green Mountains Review. You can follow her on Twitter @darisejean or at darisejeanbaptiste.com.
David E. Yee
David E. Yee is an Asian American writer whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI Online, Seneca Review, Gulf Coast Online, and elsewhere. In 2017, he won the New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, judged by Colm Tóibín, as well as the Press 53 Flash Contest judged by Jeffrey Condran. He’s a bartender in Columbus, Ohio.
Dawn Lundy Martin
Andrew Kenower Poet and activist Dawn Lundy Martin earned a BA at the University of Connecticut, an MA at San Francisco State University, and a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her poetry collections include Discipline (2011), chosen by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Prize, and A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007), which was selected for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Precise, tender, and unflinching, Martin’s work is at once innovative and emotionally fraught. Fanny Howe described the poems in Discipline as “dense and deep. They are necessary, and hot on the eye.” With Vivien Labaton, Martin coedited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (2004). She also cofounded both the Third Wave Foundation and the post-theorist Black Took Collective. She has received the Academy of American Arts and Science’s May Sarton Prize for Poetry as well as grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Martin has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, The New School, and Bard College.
Deesha Philyaw
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha will be the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.
Dia Felix
Writer and filmmaker Dia Felix is author of the Lambda-nominated experimental novel “Nochita,” published on City Lights/Sister Spit in 2014. Areas of interest include romance, celebrity, obsession, decadence, modernity, and rock and roll. She’s screened films and read at very many places including Segue, Radar Reading Series, The New Museum, and Albertine Books. She’s published recently with Ping Pong, a journal of the Henry Miller Library, The Feminist Wire, and Poetry Project Newsletter. She curates a pan-genre literary performance series, GUTS, at Dixon Place and founded and heads the maybe-fictional enterprise Personality Press. She’s from California and lives in East Harlem, New York.
Diana Khoi Nguyen
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She’s received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Didi Jackson
Didi Jackson's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, The Common, Café Review, and Passages North among other publications. Her chapbook, Slag and Fortune, was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly. She divides her time between Florida and Vermont teaching humanities at the University of Central Florida and Poetry and the Visual Arts at the University of Vermont.
Don Mee Choi
Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), a chapbook, Petite Manifesto (Vagabond, 2014), and a pamphlet, Freely Frayed (Wave Pamphlet #9). She has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and the Lucien Stryk Translation Prize.
Dowoti Désir
Dowoti Desír is a human rights activist, scholar, and photographer. She is monitor of memorials, monuments and historic sites of the Maafa/Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Emily Barton
Emily Barton is the author of three novels: The Book of Esther, Brookland, and The Testament of Yves Gundron. Her fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in many publications; she writes most often for The New York Times Book Review. Her work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Barton has also won the Bard Fiction Prize. She has taught, among other places, at New York University, Yale University, Columbia University, and Smith College, and currently chairs the creative writing program at Oberlin College.
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Create Dangerously , and Claire of the Sea Light . She is also the editor of The Butterfly ' s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2. She has written five books for young adults and children, Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou , and Mama's Nightingale, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir , Brother, I ' m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur fellow. Her most recent books is Untwine, a young adult novel. image: Lynn Savarese
Eiko Otake
Eiko Otake is a Japanese choreographer/dancer who has lived in New York since 1976. Since 1972 she and her partner Koma have collaborated as the performance team Eiko & Koma, creating and presenting a unique theater of movement in diverse venues worldwide, including numerous appearances at the American Dance Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and a month-long “living” gallery installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Eiko & Koma have received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996.
Elena Machado Saez
Elena Machado Sáez is a Professor of English at Bucknell University. She is author of Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (University of Virginia Press 2015). She is also coauthor with Raphael Dalleo of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2007).
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture. Her teaching and research interests include multiethnic literature and culture, (specifically African American and Latinx Studies), performance studies, women of color feminism, southern studies, and social movement activism. She received her PhD from University of Mississippi in English; an MA in American Studies from Columbia University; and a BA in English/ Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton. Her book project “Cultural Activism and the Civil Rights Movement” is a multidisciplinary study of creative activism and performance by minority artists and revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s. This book engages in the role of creativity in social movements and argues that the aesthetics of cultural production shaped civil rights politics. Rodriguez Fielder presents a vision of social movement activism where the collaborative production of performances and of experimental media overlapped with quotidian activities, such as farming okra and sewing quilts. Her work has appeared in The Global South, The Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South, PMLA, Undead Souths, Fifty Years After Faulkner, and Tropical Gothic with topic ranging from radicalism in Florida to ghosts in Faulkner.
Ellen Hagan
Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her books include Blooming Fiascoes, Hemisphere, Crowned, Watch Us Rise (co-written with Renée Watson) and Reckless, Glorious, Girl. She has had poems and essays published in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Northwest and in the anthologies: She Walks in Beauty, Southern Sin and Women of Resistance. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry in 2020 and has received grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Ellen is the Director of the Poetry & Theatre Departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. She co-leads the Alice Hoffman Young Writer's Retreat at Adelphi University.
Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe
Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe says: “I am a poet, filmmaker, performer, loving mother, 85 auntie and daughter. My work is about ancestors, spirit, politics, contradictions, humor, confronting white supremacy and always about healing. My recent work includes the collection of poetry Fierce Shimmer- Poems for Mama, the film Thought Woman- The Life and Ideas of Paula Gunn Allen, and organizing “A Place at the Table (We Have Always Been at the Table),” an installation exhibition with film screening and performance at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. This March 2015 event celebrates women as leaders, creators and thinkers transforming our worlds. http://www.fierceshimmer.com/
Em Rose
Em Rose is an MFA student at CUNY – City College. She holds a B.A. from Columbia, where her poems appeared in student publications Surgam, Quarto, Proxy, and Fawlt Mag. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Venezuela, researching maroon history. She previously worked as a housing organizer in Harlem and at GOLES on the Lower East Side, where she still works as a grant writer. She's received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. "The Chemist's Wife" is her first published story.
Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau is the author of The Professor's Daughter and Searching for Zion, winner of a 2014 American Book Award and a finalist for the Hurston Wright Award. She is currently Distinguished Faculty in the CUNY Graduate Center's Advanced Research Collaborative, where she's completing her third book.
Emma Heaney
Emma Heaney is the author of The New Women: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern UP 2017).
Erin Koehler
Born and raised outside Rochester, New York, Erin Koehler graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 2015 with a B.A. in English (creative writing) and a minor in Native American studies. Her poetry has been featured in Terrain, The Susquehanna Review, and Gandy Dancer, and was selected for the Adroit Journal Editor's List for the 2015 Prize for Poetry. Erin currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts, where she hopes to pursue a career writing children's literature.
Estella Gonzalez
Estella Gonzalez was born and raised in East Los Angeles, which inspires most of her writing. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol and Huizache and has been anthologized in Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature published by Bilingual Press. She received a “Special Mention” in The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: Best of the Small Presses 2014 Edition and was selected a “Reading Notable” for The Best American Non-Required Reading 2011. Currently, she serves as a contributing editor for Kweli Journal.
Fátima Portorreal
Antropóloga. Activista por los derechos civiles. Defensora de las mujeres y los hombres que trabajan la tierra.
Yalitza Ferreras
Yalitza Ferreras is the 2022-2023 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing in Madison, WI. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a recent Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories, Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
Fiona Cheong
Fiona Cheong is the author of The Scent of the Gods (W.W. Norton, 1991) and Shadow Theatre (Soho, 2002). Her shorter work can be found in Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Literature and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing.
Flavia Rocha
Flávia Rocha is the author of three poetry books published in Brazil: A Casa Azul ao Meio-Dia (Travessa dos Editores, 2005), Quartos Habitáveis (Confraria do Vento, 2011) and Um País (Confraria do Vento, 2015). She has an M.F.A. in Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. For 13 years she was an editor then editor-in-chief for the multimedia literary magazine Rattapallax, based out of New York City. She is also a screenwriter, and a founder/Director of Communications of Academia Internacional de Cinema, a film school with branches in Sao Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She currently lives in Portland, OR.
Francesca Marzia Esposito
Francesca Marzia Esposito is the author of the novel, La forma minima della felicità, which was published by Baldini & Castoldi in 2015. She lives in Milan where she teaches dance. She studied film at the Catholic University of Milan. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, GQ and other publications.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. She is the recipient of Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships as well as a Social Science Research Council and Andy Warhol Foundation grants. She is the author of Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (winner, 2004 CHOICE Award), and the editor of several books, including Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Nationalism and Colonialism; None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era, and Sovereign Acts. Among Negrón-Muntaner's films are AIDS in the Barrio, Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican, and War for Guam. She is currently completing various films, including on Valor y Cambio, her award-winning just economy public art installation of the same name, and writing an intellectual biography on Arthur Schomburg.
Francine Conley
Francine Conley is a poet, performer, and director. She has a chapbook of poems, How Dumb the Stars, through Parallel Press, and was a founding and active member of Franco-American touring theatre company, Le Theatre de la Chandelle Verte 2001-2014. Over the years she’s written, produced and performed 8 one-woman shows in English. Her current one-woman multimedia show, The Narrow Road (2015), is the fruit of a year she spent traveling and taking video footage throughout the UK in 2011-2012. The show was designed after Matsuo Basho’s 17th book, In Narrow Road to the Deep North, where as a poet he saw journey as a great metaphor: Travel is life. Life is travel. There's no end to travel; you die on the road, you're born on the road. Otherwise, her manuscript of poems, Blue Mother, is in circulation. Her website, http://francineconley.com will have up-to-date info.
Francine Harris
francine j. harris is the author of play dead, winner of the Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third collection, Here is the Sweet Hand, is forthcoming on Farrar, Straus & Giroux this fall. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and MacDowell Colony. harris is Associate Professor of English at University of Houston.
Gabrielle Rivera
Gabby Rivera is a writer, youth mentor, and editor of queer/trans POC content for Autostraddle. She works as an educator and manager of youth programming for GLSEN. Her short stories and poems have been published in various anthologies such as the Lambda-Award-winning Portland Queer: Tales from the Rose City, OMG I'm Gay, a 'zine for queer youth, and The Best of Panic! En Vivo from the East Village. Her writing and queer perspective have been featured on PBS, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, DapperQ, and at her family's dinner table over black beans and rice. Gabby's first novel is set to be published at the end of 2015.
Gabrielle Civil
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist poet, conceptual and performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. In summer 2014 she premiered “_____ is the thing with feathers” and reprised “Say My Name” (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls) at “Call & Response,” an innovative two-part festival of black women and performance that she organized at Antioch College. Other recent work includes: “Fugue (Da, Montréal)” at the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro in Montreal, Canada (June 2014); “Aide-mémoire,” at the AFiRiperFOMA Biennial in Harare, Zimbabwe (Nov. 2013); and a restaging of John Cage’s “How to Get Started.” Gabrielle is currently circulating Swallow the Fish, her critical/creative text on black feminist performance art practice. She is Associate Professor of Performance at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH. The aim of her work is to open up space. www.gabriellecivil.com
Gessy Alvarez
Gessy Alvarez is founder and editor of the web journal, Digging Through The Fat. She shares her love of art and culture as well as some of her offbeat observations on her podcast, Digging Through with Gessy Alvarez. She writes stories, poems, and essays about the middle of things.Her prose has appeared in Lunch Ticket, APT: Aforementioned Productions, Volume One Brooklyn, Entropy, Drunk Monkeys, Literary Orphans, and other publications.
Glendaliz Camacho
Glendaliz Camacho is a 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee, 2014 Jentel Foundation Artist in Residence, and 2015 Caldera Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson, and Hedgebrook Artist in Residence. She is a 2015 Write A House finalist. Glendaliz is a proud Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) alum. Her work appears in Soulmate 101 and Other True Stories of Love (Full Grown People); All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press); The Butter; Saraba Magazine; and Kweli Journal, among others. She has work forthcoming in The Female Complaint (Shade Mountain Press, 2015). Glendaliz is currently working on a short story collection and novel.
Grace Singh Smith
Grace Singh Smith was born and raised in Assam, India; she currently lives in Santa Monica. Her short stories have appeared in the Santa Monica Review, and Cleaver Magazine. Smith is an MFA candidate at Bennington College, and is at work on her first novel. Her short story "The Promotion" (Santa Monica Review, Spring 2015) was listed as a Notable in Best American Short Stories 2016, edited by Junot Diaz.
Grisel Acosta
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta is an associate professor at the City University of New York-BCC. Her first book of poetry, THINGS TO PACK ON THE WAY to Everywhere, is an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and it is forthcoming from Get Fresh Books in 2021. She is the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), an anthology that features over Latinx 30 contributors and subjects. Recent work can be found in Best American Poetry, The Baffler, Acentos Journal, Kweli Journal, Red Fez, Gathering of the Tribes Magazine, In Full Color, Paterson Literary Review, MiPoesias, Short Plays on Reproductive Freedom, and Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader. She is a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet and a Macondo Fellow.
H.N. Holder
H. N. Holder was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author of the short stories You can Always Tell; Keepsake; The Iridescent Blue-Black Boy with Wings, which won the 2nd prize in the 2011 Small Axe Journal Literary Contest; and Love Story No. 8: Jane and Phillip, a finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Hannah Eko
Hannah Eko is a writer, multi-media storyteller, and MFA candidate who currently resides in Pittsburgh, PA. You can find her work in B*tch and Bust magazines and on Buzzfeed. She enjoys geeking out on Wonder Woman, astrology, and the Divine Feminine. Hannah blogs at hanabonanza.com and enjoys Instagram (@hannahoeko) a little too much. You should ask her about love.
Hannah Soyer
Hannah Soyer is a queer disabled writer interested in exploring representations of othered bodies. Her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Entropy, Mikrokosmos Journal, Brain Mill Press, Disability Visibility Project, and Rooted in Rights, among other places. She is the founder of This Body is Worthy, a project aimed at celebrating bodies outside of mainstream societal ideals, and Words of Reclamation, a space for disabled writers. Hannah also happens to be a cat and chocolate enthusiast.
Helen Hy Kim
Helen HY. Kim is a freelance writer and translator between Korean to English. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she moved to the US at the age of 12 and spent her formative years in Los Angeles as a 1.5 generation immigrant before continuing her studies on the East Coast. Kim's practice concerns translation as a mode of life and investigates ways bilingualism shapes artistic and literary experience. She is currently translating a collection of modernist short stories from early twentieth-century Korea.
Hope Johnson
Hope Johnson is a native of Lexington, KY. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University and BA in English from the University of Kentucky. Among many, Johnson’s poetry has been published in Loose Change Magazine and Pluck Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture. Her academic work on Creative and Culturally Responsive Instruction can be found in Charter Schools: Voices from the Field. Johnson now lives in New York City, where she continues her research and work-life striving to integrate creative writing and fine arts programs into underserved schools with the NYC Department of Education.
Idra Novey
Idra Novey is the author of the debut novel Ways to Disappear, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her poetry collection Exit, Civilian was selected by Patricia Smith for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into eight languages and she’s written for The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and The Paris Review. She’s translated the work of several prominent Brazilian writers, most recently Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H.
Imani Uzuri
Vocalist, composer, cultural worker Imani Uzuri is an eclectic interdisciplinary artist who creates concerts, experimental theater, performance art, theater compositions, and sound installations in venues/festivals, including Central Park SummerStage, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, Blue Note Jazz Club, Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, Performa Biennial, Festival Sons d’hiver, London’s ICA, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Uzuri has collaborated with a wide range of noted artists across various artistic disciplines, including Herbie Hancock, Wangechi Mutu, John Legend, Vijay Iyer, Carrie Mae Weems, Trajal Harrell, Sanford Biggers, and Robert Ashley. Her acclaimed new album The Gypsy Diaries draws on her rural Southern roots, as well as influences ranging from Sufi devotionals to Romany laments. Uzuri is currently composing a new musical GIRL Shakes Lose Her Skin, inspired by the works of Philadelphia Poet Laureate Sonia Sanchez. Recently, Uzuri premiered her first orchestral composition Placeless at Ecstatic Music Festival, and was subsequently named by The New Yorker as one of the emerging “female composers edg[ing] forward.”
Irina Reyn
Irina Reyn’s new novel The Imperial Wife will be published by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press July 2016. Irina’s first novel What Happened to Anna K. was published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster in August 2008. Irina’s work has appeared in some of the following publications: One Story, Post Road, Tin House, Los Angeles Times, Town & Country Travel, Poets & Writers, The Forward, San Francisco Chronicle, The Moscow Times. Irina was born in Moscow, and currently divides her time between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
Isabel Acevedo
Isabel Acevedo is a Puerto Rican poet now residing in Milledgeville, Georgia where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Santa Ana River Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Tule Review. She also serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Arts & Letters.
Isobel O'Hare
Isobel O’Hare is a poet and essayist who has dual Irish and American citizenship. She is the author of the chapbooks Wild Materials (Zoo Cake Press, 2015), The Garden Inside Her (Ladybox Books, 2016), and Heartbreak Machinery (forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2018). Two of her poems appeared in A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault, published in 2017 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press. A collaboration with the poet Sarah Lyn Rogers will be published in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her debut full-length, a collection of erasures of public statements by celebrities accused of sexual abuse, All This Can Be Yours, is forthcoming from University of Hell Press.
Ivan Velez
Ivan Velez Jr. is an openly gay Latino American creator of comic books, known for his work with Milestone Media and for creating Tales of the Closet, one of the first comics to depict the everyday lives of LGBT youth.
Ivelisse Rodriguez
Ivelisse Rodriguez’s debut short story collection Love War Stories was a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. It was noted as a must read or best book of the year in over thirty publications, including O magazine, Women’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and more. She is a contributing arts editor for the Boston Review, where she acquires fiction. She is a 2022 Letras Boricuas fellow, a Tanne Foundation award winner, a Kimbilio fellow, and a VONA/Voices alum. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Jacqueline Bishop
The River's Song is Jacqueline Bishop’s first novel. She is also the author of two collections of poems, Fauna and Snapshots from Istanbul. Her non-fiction books are My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York and Writers Who Paint/Painters Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists. An accomplished visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, USA and Italy, Ms. Bishop was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow to Morocco; the 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow; and is a full time Master Teacher in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University.
Jamie Gilette
Jamie Gray Gillette is from Jamestown, Rhode Island. She began writing for the Newport Mercury Newspaper in high school, but discovered a love for poetry through community workshops with Frequency Writers in Providence, RI, and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, where she later interned. She is currently in an undergraduate writing student at Bard College in New York.
Janeil Page
Janeil Page’s poetry has been published most recently in Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Bluffs Literary Magazine and as part of a collaborative poetry collection through Gold Quoin Press. She is a poet in a small town in Illinois and holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars.
Janelle Poe
Janelle Poe is a writer, Harlemite, City College MFA student, DJ & digger who loves uncovering hidden gems and connections, finding this approach widely applicable. A background in International Studies and life as a black woman in America and abroad, she writes about the inherent intersectionality of injustice. A VONA participant, she is ever grateful for the leaders, including Aster(ix), crafting space for the expression and amplification of marginalized voices. Combining her poetry with images by Sheryl Oppenheim, the two recently published a zine to raise funds for Black Lives Matter entitled,”Black & White Studies” with Small Editions. Currently at work on a collection of short stories and essays, illustrious publications and titles are forthcoming. This is one. Following her dreams, she encourages you to follow yours. www.Elle-DJ.com.
Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, an Indie Next Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and finalist for the Discover Prize. Díaz has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, I Am Deliberate, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books. She teaches at Columbia University.
Jasmine Johnson
Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson is an Assistant Professor of African & Afro-American and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Currently, Johnson is completing her manuscript, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora, while in residence as a Newhouse Center for the Humanities Fellow at Wellesley College. She writes about dance, black feminism and diaspora.
Jeanne Bonner
Jeanne Bonner is a writer and journalist based in Connecticut. She is the 2018 winner of the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature, given by PEN America. Her essays have been published by The New York Times, CNN Travel and Catapult. She studied Italian literature at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College.
Jenelle Troxell
Jenelle Troxell received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Union College. She is a co-editor of the journal Convolution and is presently at work on a book manuscript What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes: Transnationalism, Feminism, and the Cinematic Avant-garde.
Jennifer L. Croft
Jennifer Croft is an American author, critic and translator who works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. With the author Olga Tokarczuk, she was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights.
Jessica Diaz
As a Latinx "Artivist" and Bronx-native, Jessica credits her urban roots and heritage most for fueling her lifelong commitment to education, advocacy and The Arts. Some of Jessica's poetry was recently published in the book, "BX Writers Anthology: Volume One" via BX Writers & Bronx Native, and she hopes to continue to generate more work to publish a compilation of her own.
Jessica Lanay Moore
Jessica Lanay is a poet and short story writer originally from the Florida Keys. She is interested in writing towards the incalculable nature of human emotions, psychology and metaphysical dilemmas. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and works at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow; she has workshopped with poets such as Carl Hancock Rux, Gregory Pardlo, Evie Shockley, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. She also founded a women's editorial group called The Jasper Collective while working in the advertising department of Poets & Writers Magazine. It was during her work with the Jasper Collective that she had her first publishing successes. She believes that working with a diverse body of women in editorial partnership was a large reason for achieving those publications. Jessica Lanay's writing can be found in Five Quarterly, Crab Fat Literary Magazine, TAYO Literary Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Duende, and Black Candies: A Journal of Literary Horror and others. She is currently working on a collection of poetry and a short story collection.
January Gill O'Neil
January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and currently serves on the boards of AWP and Montserrat College of Art. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two children in Beverly, MA.
Joanna Commandaros
JoAnna Commandaros is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she currently lives and works. Her drawings, sculptures, and installations are inspired by alchemy, cultural aesthetics, and ecological systems. Her work are reflective of her Greek and Syrian roots. She has participated in residencies and exhibitions nationally and internationally. For more information, visit her website.
Joe Jiménez
Joe Jiménez is the author of The Possibilities of Mud (Korima 2014) and Bloodline (Arte Público 2016). Jiménez is the recipient of the 2016 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Poetry Prize. Jimenez’s essays and poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Iron Horse, RHINO, Bat City, and Waxwing, and on the PBS NewsHour and Lambda Literary sites. Jimenez was recently awarded a Lucas Artists Literary Artists Fellowship from 2017-2020. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is a member of the Macondo Writing Workshops. For more information, visit joejimenez.net
John Keene
John Keene’s Counternarratives (New Directions) was published in the spring of 2015, with a British edition appearing in 2016. He is also the author of Annotations (New Directions), the poetry-art collection Seismosis (1913 Press), with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and the collaboration GRIND (ITI Press), with photographer Nicholas Muellner. His translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s Letters from a Seducer appeared in 2014 from Nightboat Books and A Bolha Editora. A longtime member of the Dark Room Collective and a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, he currently is a member of the African Poetry Book Fund, and serves as Chair of African American and African Studies and Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark.
Jose Araguz
A CantoMundo fellow, José Angel Araguz has had poems recently in Huizache and Salamander. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Author of six chapbooks and the collection Everything We Think We Hear, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence.
Josefina Báez
Josefina Báez (La Romana, Dominican Republic/New York). Storyteller, performer, writer, theatre director, educator, devotee. Founder and director of Ay Ombe Theatre (1986). Alchemist of creative life process: Performance Autology (creative process based on the autobiography and wellness of the doer). Books published: Dominicanish, Comrade, Bliss ain’t playing, Dramaturgia I & II, Como la una/Como uma, Levente no. Yolayorkdominicanyork, De levente. 4 textos para teatro performance, Canto de plenitud, Latin In (Antología de Autología), As Is E’ (anthology) and Why is my name Marysol? (a children’s book). www.josefinabaez.com
Joshua Graber
Joshua Graber is a Pittsburgh-based writer, translator, and educator. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The New Guard Review’s BANG!, and Map Literary. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.
Joshunda Sanders
Joshunda Sanders is a writer and journalist who has learned to make home wherever she can. She has written for Bitch, Salon, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Huizache, the Bellevue Literary Review and many other publications. Her book, How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media: Why The Future of Journalism Depends on Women and People of Color was published by Praeger/ABC-CLIO in August 2015. She lives in Washington D.C.
Josina Manu Maltzman
Josina Manu Maltzman writes: “I am a carpenter by day, a production manager by night, a writer by passion, and a rabble-rouser by everything else. I’ve been writing short stories and essays for as long as memory provides, with the honor of being published in That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation in 2004. I have had also the pleasure of working with Ananya Dance Theatre as Production Manager for the company, since January 2013. This allows me to combine my organizational and creative efforts, working with a dance company rooted in values of social, racial and environmental justice — the same values that propel me in my personal endeavors. Currently I am working on a mytho-biography spanning multiple generations of a Jewish family, which relates historical trauma to cycles of violence, both intimate and global. I was awarded a MN State Arts Board Artist’s Initiative Grant in 2014 to further this project.”
Juan Carlos Reyes
Juan Carlos Reyes was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He's the product of a math degree, though only words hold his attention anymore. His first book, A Summer's Lynching, won the Quarterly West 2016 novella prize, and his chapbook, Elements of a Bystander, won the 2017 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize. His stories, poems and essays have appeared in Ascentos Review, KGB Lit, and Hawai’i Review, among others. He is currently a Jack Straw Fellow and serves as an assistant professor of creative writing at Seattle University.
Julian Delgado Lopera
Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of The New York Times acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press 2020), the Winner of the 2021 Ferro Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary award; a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Julián is also the author of ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute 2017), an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants. Julián’s received fellowships and residencies from The National Endowment for the Arts, Black Mountain Institute, Creative Work Fund, Hedgebrook, California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, Headlands Center for The Arts. Their work has appeared in Granta, Teen Vogue, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, The White Review, LALT, Four Way Review, TimeOut Mag to name a few. They are the former executive director of RADAR Productions and one of the founders of Drag Queen Story Hour. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Julián currently resides in San Francisco.
Junauda Petrus
Junauda Petrus is a writer, aerialist, performance artist, runaway witch and soul sweetener. She has written for the page, stage and screen and loves to produce wild and powerful pieces with her experimental arts collective, Free Black Dirt, with co-creator, Erin Sharkey. She is grateful to be an artist in this lifetime and loves to create art that seeks to explore, expand and excite around the experience of Blackness and love and light. In March she directed her play “There Are Other Worlds,” a piece that uses aerial, movement and soundscape to tell the story of incarceration, blackness, motherhood and love.
Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Karen An-hwei Lee
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Duress (Cascade 2022), Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics (Slant 2021), Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations, was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series (2013). She serves as provost and a professor of English at Wheaton College.
Katherinna Mar
Katherinna Mar is a genre-fluid writer from Chicago. She received an MFA in fiction from Bennington College and was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops in 2018. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Tech.
Katie Gutierrez
Katie Gutierrez is the author of the national bestselling and Edgar- nominated debut novel More Than You'll Ever Know, which was also a Good Morning America Book Club selection. She is a National Magazine Award finalist whose writing has appeared in TIME, Harper's Bazaar, Longreads, and more. She has an MFA from Texas State University and lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and their two kids.
Kegels For Hegel
Kegels for Hegel is a conceptual art project and an open collaboration of academics and artists.
Kelsey Valadez
Kelsey is a freelance writer and editor based in Texas. She is currently working on a manuscript and literary journal. Her main interests are narratology, translingualism, and metafiction.
Keya Mitra
Keya Mitra is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University and graduated in 2010 with a doctorate from the University of Houston¹s Creative Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA. She also worked as an assistant professor of creative writing at Gonzaga University for three years. In 2008, Keya spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing. Keya¹s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review (in 2011 and 2015), Arts and Letters, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Southwest Review, Slush Pile, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation. She has completed a novel as well as a short-story collection and memoir. Furthermore, one of Keya¹s novels has been a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and her short story collection has been a finalist for the Bakeless Prize, the Flannery O¹Connor Short Fiction Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. In 2005, Keya received a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer¹s Conference. Keya also had the privilege of working as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts for two years.
Khadijah Queen
Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Akashic Books 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011), Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015). Her fifth book, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, will be published in spring 2017 by YesYes Books. She teaches in the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.
Kianny N. Antigua
Kianny N. Antigua is a Senior Lecturer of Spanish at Dartmouth College, and an independent translator and adapter for Pepsqually VO Sound & Design, Inc. Antigua has published twenty-four books of children’s literature (seven by commission), five of short stories, two collections of poems, an anthology in two languages, a book of microfiction, and a novel. She has won sixteen literary awards and many of her texts have been included in anthologies, literary journals, newspapers and textbooks. Some have been translated into English, French and Italian. She is the translator (Eng./Spa.) and the audiobook narrator of Dominicana (Seven Stories Press, 2021), by Angie Cruz; translator of the children's novel Lucky Broken Girl, by Ruth Behar; the YA novel Never Look Back (Bloomsbury/Audible, 2022), by Lilliam Rivera; and the picture book Plantains Go with Everything (HarperCollins, 2023), by Lissette J. Norman.
Kim Dana Kupperman
Kim Dana Kupperman is the author of the essay collection, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence, and, forthcoming in November 2016, The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir. She is the founding editor of Welcome Table Press, a nonprofit independent press devoted to publishing and celebrating the essay. She is a guest faculty member at West Virginia Wesleyan's low-residency MFA Program and teaches in Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing Program.
Kimberly Alidio
Kimberly Alidio is the author of why letter ellipses (selva oscura press, 2020), After projects the resound (Black Radish Books, 2016), and the chapbooks, a cell of falls (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2019) and solitude being alien (dancing girl press, 2013). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, Sinister Wisdom, and wildness. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan and an MFA candidacy in poetry from the University of Arizona.
Lark Omura
Lark Omura was born and raised on the island of Maui and currently resides in Oakland, CA. She is a VONA Voices alumna, and performs regularly at readings around the Bay Area. Her poetry can be found in Bamboo Ridge, Canary, and The Hawaii Review, among other places. Her writing often smells of the ocean, and contemplates the beauty of being human within the context of a capitalist society.
Latasha N. Nevada Diggs
A writer and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of Village (Coffee House Press 2023) and TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Diggs has presented and performed at California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center and at festivals including: Explore the North Festival, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; Hekayeh Festival, Abu Dhabi; International Poetry Festival of Copenhagen; Ocean Space, Venice; International Poetry Festival of Romania; Question of Will, Slovakia; Poesiefestival, Berlin; and the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, La Casita, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium. LaTasha, with writer Greg Tate, co-founded Coon Bidness, YoYo & SO4 magazine. Diggs has received a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a 2016 Whiting Award and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, as well as grants and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.- Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She teaches at Brooklyn and Barnard College.
Latina/o Studies Williams College
This conversation was organized by Mérida Rúa at Williams College and made possible by co-sponsors of Latino Studies: The Class of 1960 Scholars, American Studies, Spanish, English, Theater, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Office of the President, The Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, The Davis Center and Lista.
Laura Sims
Laura Sims is the author of four books of poetry: Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), My god is this a man, Stranger, and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books). In 2014 she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist (powerHouse Books). Her work was included in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and individual poems have recently appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, andGulf Coast. She has published book reviews and essays in Boston Review, Evening Will Come, Jacket, New England Review, Rain Taxi and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Laura Winther Galaviz
Laura Winther Galaviz holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. You can find her work in Colorado Review, The Rumpus, Grist, The Common and elsewhere.
Laura Gómez
Laura Gómez is an actress and writer best known for her role as Blanca Flores on Orange Is the New Black. She has been featured on television in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the miniseries Show Me a Hero, and on film in Exposed, America Adrift, and Sambá, which had its world premiere at Tribeca in 2017. Gómez has directed three short films, The Iron Warehouse, Hallelujah, and To Kill a Roach, which won the NYU Technisphere Award in 2012. She is a member of Dorset Theater Festival’s “Women Artists Writing,” a creative collective giving voices to female theater artists.
Lauren Francis-Sharma
LAUREN FRANCIS-SHARMA is the author of Book of the Little Axe (May, 2020) and ‘Til the Well Runs Dry, which debuted in 2014 and was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize, awarded the Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. ‘Til the Well Runs Dry was also chosen as an O, The Oprah Magazine Summer Reading Pick and lauded by the New York Times, USA Today, Essence Magazine, and People Magazine amongst other publications.
Lauren Russell
Lauren Russell is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). A 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and residencies from the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and City of Asylum/Passa Porta. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, Cream City Review, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2015 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others. She has been assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh for the last four years. Beginning in the fall of 2020, she will join the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the Center for Poetry there.
Lawrence Schimel
Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual (Spanish/English) author and literary translator. His translations into English include LA BASTARDA by Trifonia Melibea Obono (The Feminist Press) and NIÑOS: POEMS FOR THE LOST CHILDREN OF CHILE by María José Ferrada (Eerdmans); into Spanish, BLUETS by Maggie Nelson (Tres Puntos Ediciones) and AMNESIA COLECTIVA by Koleka Putuma (with Arrate Hidalgo; Flores Raras).
Layhannara Tep
Layhannara Tep was born and raised in Long Beach, California. She is the daughter of Cambodian refugees, an experience that continues to shape her writing. She is currently pursuing her master's in Asian American Studies at UCLA, where she is working on a collection of short stories about the Cambodian American diaspora. Layhannara enjoys stories and art in all forms. In her free time, you can find her at the movies, enjoying live music, or getting lost in a museum (she seriously gets lost everywhere). Layhannara enjoys ice cream on rainy days and iced coffees in any weather. She has a growing to-be-read pile. If you see her at a bookstore, please remind her she's not allowed to buy a new book until she finishes one she already owns. Seriously.
Leila Christine Nadir
Leila Christine Nadir is an Afghan-American artist, writer, and educator. She is the author of award-winning essays and artworks about public health, the Afghan diaspora, environmental theory, and her personal experiences of religion, ethnicity, trauma, and healing. Her primary project right now is her childhood memoir, titled Bad Muslim, which chronicles growing up within the colorful, turbulent marriage of her Afghan, Muslim father and Slovak-American, Catholic mother, who together raised seven children. Excerpts have appeared in Aster(ix), North American Review, Asian American Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Quarterly. She earned her PhD in literature from Columbia University, and is currently an Assistant Professor at University of Rochester, where she is also Founding Director of the Environmental Humanities Program. More info about her work can be found at http://leilanadir.xyz/.
Leslieann Hobayan
Leslieann Hobayan is a poet-writer, yogi, and a member of VONA, a community dedicated to writers of color. Nominated for a Pushcart, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Rigorous, Barely South Review, Generations Literary Journal, The New York Quarterly, Phati’tude, Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina-American Writers, and Pinoy Poetics. She has been awarded the James Merrill Fellowship for Poetry at the Vermont Studio Center, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation writing fellowship for a residency at Millay Colony for the Arts, and an artist grant for the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Conference. Currently teaching at Rutgers University, she has served as a writing mentor for youth at Urban Word NYC and has taught creative writing at UC-Santa Cruz and Montclair State University. She is at work on a collection of poems as well as a collection of essays.
Leslie C. Youngblood
Leslie C. Youngblood received an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and served as columnist and assistant editor for Atlanta Tribune: The Magazine. She’s been awarded a host of writing honors including a 2014 Yaddo's Elizabeth Ames Residency, the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize, a Hurston Wright Fellowship, 2010 Go On Girl! Book Club Aspiring Writer Award, and the Room of Her Own Foundation’s 2009 Orlando Short Story Prize. She received funding to attend the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony in 2011. The first novel excerpt was published Kweli Journal, 2014. Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and raised in Rochester, New York, she’s fortunate to have a family of natural storytellers and a circle of supportive and family and friends. Publication of her first novel, Love Like Sky, is forthcoming.
Leticia Hernández-Linares
Leticia Hernández-Linares is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and educator, and the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl (Tía Chucha Press, 2015). Widely published, her work appears in newspapers, literary journals, and anthologies, some of which include: U.S. Latino Literature Today, Street Art San Francisco, Pilgrimage, Huizache, and This Bridge We Call Home. She has performed her poemsongs throughout the country and in El Salvador. Active in Central American Art and Literature, she participated in the 2014 Encuentro Poético: Salvadoran-American Poets at the Smithsonian. She is the founder of an artist collaborative, Amate: Women Painting Stories, and a CantoMundo alumna and organizing committee member. A three-time San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist grantee, she lives, works, and writes in the Mission District, San Francisco—20 years strong. Visit her: joinleticia.com
Lilliam Rivera
Lilliam Rivera is a MacDowell fellow and an award-winning author of eight works of fiction: four young adult novels, three middle grade books, and a graphic novel for DC Comics. Her books have been awarded a Pura Belpré Honor, been featured on NPR, New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, NY Times, and multiple “best of” lists. Her novel Never Look Back is slated for an Amazon movie adaptation. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Her adult debut Tiny Threads (Del Rey Books) will be available in bookstores September 24, 2024. A Bronx, New York native, Lilliam currently lives in Los Angeles.
Lina Mounzer
Lina Mounzer is a writer and translator living and working in Beirut. Her work has appeared in Bidoun, Warscapes, The Berlin Quarterly, Chimurenga and Literary Hub. She is the prose editor for the Beirut-based literary journal Rusted Radishes, and has translated, from Arabic to English, short stories by Chaza Charafeddine and Mazen Maarouf and a novel by Hassan Daoud. Among other things, she is at work on her first novel.
최 Lindsay
최 Lindsay is based in Berkeley California and is the author of Transverse (FuturePoem, 2020), and a chapbook, Matrices (Spect! Books, 2017). They are a Kundiman Fellow and a Ph.D student in English Literature at UC Berkeley. More of their work can be found in Omniverse, Amerarcana, Apogee, The Felt, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 2, and elsewhere. Recent projects include a creative manuscript in and out of translation on the colonial history of leprosy in Korea.
Lissette Escariz Ferrá
Lissette Escariz Ferrá is a Cuban immigrant from La Habana del Este. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a Master’s in English Literature and is currently a PhD. student at the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of interest include caribbean, latinx, and US multiethnic literature. She also dedicates her time to writing poetry and fiction.
Li Yun Alvarado
Li Yun Alvarado is the author of the chapbooks Words or Water and Nuyorico, CA. A poet and scholar, her work has appeared in Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education; The Acentos Review; PMS Poemmemoirstory; and Cura: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action, among others. She has served as the Senior Poetry Editor for Kweli Journal and is an alumna of VONA/Voices Writing Workshop and AROHO. Li Yun is a native New Yorker living in Long Beach, California who takes frequent trips to Salinas, Puerto Rico to visit la familia. www.liyunalvarado.com
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert works in the fields of literature, ecocriticism and environmental history, art history, and cultural studies. She specializes in the multidisciplinary study of the Caribbean. She is based in the Hispanic Studies Department at Vassar College. She is currently working on a new book project: The Amazon Parrots of the Caribbean: An Environmental Biography and on a translation of Dominican author Pedro Vergés’ 1982 novel, Solo cenizas hallarás with her friend and colleague Margarite Fernández Olmos.
Lizz Huerta
Lizz Huerta is a working class writer from the borderlands of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Lumina, The Portland Review, Duende and other publications. She is currently polishing up a short story collection and fantasy novel. twitter @lizzhuerta.
Lorgia Garcia Pena
Lorgia García-Peña is a Professor of Latinx Studies at Tufts University, the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, and the author of three books: Translating Blackness (2022), Community as Rebellion (2022) and The Borders of Dominicanidad (Duke 2016). She is the co-editor of the Texas University Press series, Latinx: the Future is now and the co-director of Archives of Justice. She writes and teaches in English and Spanish about the intersections of blackness, colonialism and migration, centering Black Latinx lives.
Lorraine Avila
Lorraine Avila is an Afro-Kiskeyana born and raised in the Bronx. She graduated from Fordham University with a degree in English and Middle East studies and a minor in Creative Writing. For the past six years, she has been a New York certified educator; In 2017, she received her Masters degree from New York University in teaching. In 2019, she became one of The Wing Scholarship Program's recipients. Her writing has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Moko Magazine, The GirlMob, La Galeria Magazine, and Blavity. Lorraine currently resides in the Bronx, New York.
Lucas De Lima
Lucas de Lima is a Brazilian-born poet, artist, scholar, and educator. They are the author of Wet Land (Action Books 2014) and Tropical Sacrifice (Birds LLC 2022) as well as multiple chapbooks. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canada Council for the Arts, they hold a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. de Lima lives in New York City and teaches at Mount Holyoke College.
Lucia LoTempio
Lucia LoTempio is the author of Hot with the Bad Things, forthcoming from Alice James Books in May 2020. Lucia hails from Buffalo, NY and left to earn an MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. You can find her poems in Passages North, The Journal, TYPO, Quarterly West, as part of the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day series, and elsewhere. With Suzannah Russ Spaar, she co-authored the chapbook Undone in Scarlet (Tammy 2019). Lucia is still in Pittsburgh, where she works at the literary nonprofit City of Asylum.
Lucia Hierro
Lucia Hierro (b. 1987) is a Dominican American conceptual artist born and raised in New York City, Washington Heights/Inwood, and currently based in the South Bronx. Lucia’s practice, which includes sculpture, digital media and installation, confronts twenty-first century capitalism through an intersectional lens. Hierro’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), Elizabeth Dee Gallery (New York), Latchkey Projects (New York), Primary Projects (Miami), Sean Horton Presents (Dallas), and Casa Quien in the Dominican Republic. Her works reside in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the JP Morgan & Chase Collection, Progressive Art Collection, and the Rennie collection in Vancouver, among others, as well as in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Luivette Resto
Luivette Resto was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico but proudly raised in the Bronx. She earned her bachelors in English Literature from Cornell University in 1999 and later her M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry in 2003 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Program for Poets and Writers. Her first book of poetry Unfinished Portrait was published in 2008 by Tia Chucha Press, whose editor is our current Los Angeles poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez, and later the book was named a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize. She has served as a contributing poetry editor for Kweli Journal, a CantoMundo fellow, and a member of the advisory board of Con Tinta. Her new book Ascension was published in April 2013 courtesy of Tia Chucha Press, and it was recently selected for the 2014 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for previous finalists of the Paterson Poetry Prize. Some of her latest work can be read on Luna Luna Magazine, Toe Good Poetry, Upworthy, Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and the Altadena Anthology 2015. Currently, she lives in Glendora with her three children.
Lupe Mendez
Poet, teacher, and activist Lupe Mendez is the author of the poetry collection Why I Am Like Tequila (Willow Books, 2019). He earned an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Texas at El Paso. His poetry has appeared in Luna Luna, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Revista Síncope, Pilgrimage, Border Senses, Gigantic Sequence, and Gulf Coast, among others. Mendez is one of the founders of the Librotraficante Movement and of Tintero Projects, a Texas based grassroots organization that works to provide a platform for emerging Latinx writers and writers of color within the Gulf Coast Region and beyond. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Macondo, and the Crescendo Literary/Poetry Foundation's Poetry Incubator. Mendez lives in Houston, where he has worked as an educator for the last 19 years.
Lupita Aquino
Lupita Aquino—better known as Lupita Reads—is a passionate literary enthusiast amplifying and highlighting books through Instagram and TikTok. When she’s not reading, you can catch her occasionally writing about books for Today.com, She Reads.com, and for her substack, where she spotlights Latine authors and their books on a weekly basis. She lives in the greater Washington DC area and enjoys visiting the local bookstores with her family on the weekend.
N. NourbeSe Philip
M. NourbeSe Philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. She practiced law in the City of Toronto for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. She has published four books of poetry including the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, one novel and four collections of essays. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Her most recent work is Bla_K, a collection of essays on racism and culture.
Madhu Kaza
Madhu Kaza was born in Andhra Pradesh, India and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. She is currently an educator, writer and artist based in New York. Much of her work is informed by her astonishment at everyday life.
Magda Kapa
Magda Kapa, born in Greece and now living in northern Germany, worked as a freelance screenwriter and Modern Greek and English teacher. Her first poetry collection All the Words was published by Phoenicia Publishing. She is also a photographer and blogs http://notborninenglish.wordpress.com/ and tweets as @MagdaKapa.
Mahwash Shoaib
Mahwash Shoaib is a poet, translator and scholar. Her nonfiction, fiction, poetry and scholarly articles have appeared in many anthologies and journals. Her translations of the poetry of Kishwar Naheed, Wrapped in Dread and Dynamite, will be published by Upset Press. She currently teaches in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Mankwe Ndosi
Mankwe Ndosi is a singer/ musicmaker and a cultural catalyst who is studying her Tanzanian heritage, medicinal plants, and living simply and creatively with others. She works in the Twin Cities, Chicago and internationally. She weaves performance genres including improvised music, acapella rhythm and harmonies, hip-hop, afro soul, dance, performance art, and sung prayer/ritual. She infuses creative practice into healing, sustainable economic development, education, and new village community building.
María del Socorro Limón
Born and raised along the border between El Paso and Cd. Juárez, I was shaped by the borderland’s flow of language, stories, mañas, and chisme. I’m an on-again, off-again writer who pissed Sandra Cisneros off because I don’t write as much as Sandra correctly believes I should. I am forever grateful to my fellow Macondistas who, a pesar de todo, believe in the power of writing. I’ve devoted much of my life to moving the needle forward around domestic and sexual violence; I currently work at CU Denver’s Center on Domestic Violence. I’m finally ready to write about what it was like to tend to my beloved jotería during the early AIDS years. There’s enough distance now; I can look back and see the stories taking shape without the grief knocking the wind out of me.
María Guzmán
María Guzmán is a poet and writer. Her poems appear in EcoTheo Review, Rattle Magazine, and The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought. She has been nominated for 2020 & 2021 Best of the Net. María has received support from Community of Writers at The Valley, Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and VONA Voices. She received a BA in Urban Studies & Anthropology from Saint Peter’s University and MFA in Poetry from New York University.
Marlène Ramírez-Cancio
Marlène Ramírez-Cancio (2021-22 Aster(ix) Artist in Residence) is a Puerto Rican cultural producer, artist, and educator based in Lenapehoking, aka Brooklyn. She is the Founding Director of EmergeNYC, an incubator and network for emerging artists-activists in NYC and beyond, focused on developing the artistic expression of people of color and LGBTQAI+ folks. In 2021, she brought the incubator to BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, where she is currently Director of EmergeNYC and Practice Lab. Through Mujer Que Pregunta, Marlène works as a tarot practitioner and Process Doula to help BIPOC cultural workers shape their ideas, clarify their purpose, and make sure their projects align with the goals of their practice. When the dinosaurios roamed the Earth, she co-founded Fulana, a Latina satire collective whose videos have been shown internationally at film festivals, museums, and universities. Marlène serves on the Steering Committee of LxNY/Latinx Arts Consortium of New York, the Board of Directors of the National Performance Network, and the Board of Advisors of The Action Lab and the Center for Artistic Activism. She is the mom of a wonderful child, and is currently learning how to sew her own clothes. | mujerquepregunta.com
Marlin M. Jenkins
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of University of Michigan's MFA program, their work has found homes with Indiana Review, Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, Waxwing, Kenyon Review Online, and The Rumpus. They currently live and teach in Minnesota.
Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela
Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela’s writing has been recognized by The Leeway Foundation, Hedgebrook and others. Her work has been published in Make/shift, The Rust Belt Rising, Apiary, Aster(ix) and is forthcoming in All About Skin: An Anthology of Short Fiction by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color. She is the founder of Thread Makes Blanket press, http://www.threadmakesblanket.com, which most recently published Dismantle, an anthology of work from VONA, an annual workshop for writers of color. As part of her teaching at Community College of Philadelphia, Marissa teaches in Philadelphia jails, develops Latino courses, and tries hard to get her students to love reading and writing. She is working on her first novel.
M. L. Vargas
M.L. Vargas is a writer, educator and serves as poetry editor for Aster(ix) Journal. She was appointed poet in residence for the Montclair Art Museum (MAM) in 2014. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, most recently The Lake Rises: poems to & for our bodies of water. She holds an MFA in poetry from Drew University and lives in New Jersey.
Matt Richardson
Matt Richardson is Associate Professor in English and African and African Diaspora Studies. He is affiliated with the Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. He has published articles in The Journal of Women's History, Black Camera: A Journal Devoted to the Study and Documentation of the Black Cinematic Experience, Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of the NSRC and The Journal of Women’s History, as well as works of fiction in publications like Queer Codex and Does Your Mama Know: African American Coming Out Stories. He received the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship National Fellowship for Junior Faculty and the Dean’s Fellowship in 2009.
Melanie Márquez Adams
Melanie Márquez Adams is an MFA candidate in Spanish Creative Writing and a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship at the University of Iowa. Her short story collection, Mariposas Negras, won Third Place in the 2018 North Texas Book Festival Spanish Fiction Awards. Melanie's work has appeared in storySouth, Dash, Whale Road Review, Asterix Journal, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a poet & educator living in Brooklyn by way of Boston. She is the author of chapbooks rude girl is lonely girl! & peluda. Her work has been featured in Remezcla, Buzzfeed, Glamour Magazine, Muzzle, Bustle, Huffington Post, & The Guardian. She is currently an MFA candidate at NYU’s Graduate Program for Creative Writing.
Melissa R. Sipin
Melissa R. Sipin is a writer from Carson, CA. She won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open and ON-SQU’s Flash Fiction Prize. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology on Philippine myths (Carayan Press 2014), and her work is in Guernica, Eleven Eleven, and Hyphen Magazine, among others. Cofounder of TAYO Literary Magazine, her fiction has won scholarships/fellowships from Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and was shortlisted for the David Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. As the Poets & Writers McCrindle Fellow in Los Angeles, she is hard at work on a short story collection and novel.
Melissa Rivero
Melissa Rivero is the author of The Affairs of the Falcóns and the forthcoming Flores and Miss Paula (Ecco/HarperCollins). She won the 2019 New American Voices Award, a 2020 International Latino Book Award, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Born in Lima, Peru and raised in Brooklyn, she is a graduate of NYU and Brooklyn Law School, where she was an editor of the Brooklyn Law Review. Melissa still lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Michelle Yasmine Valladares
Michelle Yasmine Valladares is an immigrant born in India and raised in Kuwait. She is a poet and filmmaker and is the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at City College of New York in Harlem. Her first book is Nortada, The North Wind. Her poems have been widely published and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won the Distinguished Documentary Achievement from the Independent Documentary Association for “El Diablo Nunca Duerme” co-produced with Lourdes Portillo and Best Latin American Film at Sundance Festival for “O Sertão das Memórias ” co-produced with José Araújo.
Michelle Be
A native of south Minneapolis, Michelle Be (Michelle Barnes) is a spoken word poet, visual artist, theater artist, and DJ. She uses her work to dive into many levels of introspection in order to reconfigure, heal, and progress. With a background in psychology, Michelle aims to bridge science and spirituality through her art: “I am most interested in connecting with audiences on a cerebral level. This allows me to remain authentic in expressing that which forms in my creative state of mind.” Michelle has performed her spoken word poetry at Pillsbury House+Theatre, Bedlam Theater, Intermedia Arts and Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis, MN. She is a multi-disciplinary teaching artist, specializing in youth arts programming, and is an artistic director for RARE Productions, an organization supporting queer artists of color.
Michelle Lin
Michelle Lin is a poet, editor, and activist. She earned her MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and her BA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside. She has taught for the LEAPS summer program, Gluck Fellows Program for the Arts, Young Writer’s Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh. She has edited for journals Hot Metal Bridge, B. E. Quarterly, and Mosaic. She currently serves as Poetry Reader for Twelfth House Journal. She works for API Legal Outreach, a social justice non-profit serving marginalized communities in the greater Bay Area. Her full length poetry collection A House Made of Water is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2017.
Mine Gencel Bek
Mine Gencel Bek is a professor at the Department of Journalism, Faculty of Communication, Ankara University. She completed her Ph.D. at Loughborough University in 1999 with the thesis Communicating Capitalism: A Study of the Contemporary Turkish Press. This analysis included the structural elements of the changing industry, news as texts, and the role of journalists in the news-production process. For that thesis, she conducted interviews with journalists and editors and investigated the news production process. Her publications have a wide range of issues: the political economy of Turkish media; the media policies in the European Union and Turkey; media professionals and textual analysis of news in press and TV on the issues such as tabloidization and representation of women and children. Common to all of her work is criticism of unethical practices of irresponsible media and the call for the democratization of societies for freedom and equality, and the democratization of the media, with a special focus on journalism. Her current research is on the comparative media systems, journalism practices, and technological innovations.
Mira Kaufman
A mother of four and a retired biology teacher, born in 1954 to parents who came from Romania and endured the sufferings of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Today she writes, sings in a choir, takes different classes and volunteers in school to help children with biology. Published two books of poetry and short stories.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia, where she is Writer in Residence. She was a winner of the War & Peace faculty initiative grant for The Evening Hero and has written about the Korean War for Gen Magazine, Salon, and most recently for Ibram X. Kendi's journal, The Emancipator. One of a handful of American journalists who have been granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War, Lee was also the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Guardian, among others. She has appeared on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer talking about diplomacy in North Korea and on Dr. Sanjay Gupta's program Weed, discussing being the first parent to use cannabis for her son with autism. She is a staff writer for The Millions and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Monique McIntosh
Monique McIntosh is a freelance writer based in South Florida. Her work has recently appeared in Luxe Interiors + Design, Venice, Art & Object, Art Hive and Island Origins. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University and a BA in English Literature from Davidson College. She loves writing about art, design and all things culture.
Mubanga Kalimamukwento
Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian storyteller. She has an MFA from Hamline University, an LL.M. from the University of Minnesota (twin cities) and an LL.B. from Cavendish University Zambia. Until 2019, she practised law in Zambia. She is the author of The Mourning Bird (Jacana Media) and unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press). She is the winner of the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award (2019), the Kalemba Short Story Prize (2019), the Writer of Color Merit Scholarship (2020 - 2023), the Deborah Keenan Poetry Scholarship (2021), the Jacobson Scholarship (2021) and the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Prize (2022). Her work has appeared on Brittle Paper's Top 15 Debut Books of 2019 and shortlists for the; Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Raz- Shumaker Book Prize, Minnesota Author Project, Bristol Short Story Prize, Nobrow Short Story Prize, Bush Fellowship, Miles Morland Scholarship, & Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She's been anthologized on Netflix and in various journals, including adda and Overland. When she isn't writing, Mubanga works as the fiction editor at Doek! and a mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Myriam Gurba
Myriam Gurba is a high school teacher, writer, podcaster and artist who lives in Long Beach, California. Her most recent book, the true crime memoir Mean, was a New York Times editors’ choice. Publishers Weekly describes her as a “literary voice like none other.” Gurba co-hosts the AskBiGrlz advice podcast with cartoonist, and fellow biracialist, MariNaomi. Her collage and digital artwork has been shown in museums, galleries, and community centers.
Myriam J.A. Chancy
Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian writer who was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and raised in Quebec City, Canada. She is currently a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
Naima Coster
Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street, a novel about gentrification, family, and memory, set in Brooklyn, New York (Little A 2017). She is a graduate of the Columbia University MFA program and also holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from Yale University and Fordham University. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Arts & Letters, Kweli, The Rumpus, Guernica, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among other places. Naima has taught writing in a range of settings, from prison to after-school programs, summer camps, and universities. She tweets about literature, culture, and justice as @zafatista.
Nalini Jones
NALINI JONES is the author of What You Call Winter, a story collection set in a Catholic neighborhood of Mumbai. She is a recipient of an NEA fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story and Ninth Letter, among others, and she has contributed to anthologies about siblings, HIV in India, and Miles Davis. She is currently at work on a novel.
Natalia Torres
Natalia Torres earned her BA in Art and Ethnicity, Race, & Migration from Yale, and her master’s in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she focused on racial justice and educational equity. Her graduate work led her to DreamYard where she is currently the Department Director for Visual Art & Maker, and has been able to merge her passions for education, art, and racial equity.
Natalie Leger
Natalie M. Léger is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She completed a PhD in English Literature at Cornell University in the field of Caribbean and postcolonial literature and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tufts University. Her research explores coloniality and anti-blackness in the Caribbean literary imaginary. Her current book project, Envision Otherwise: Haiti and the Decolonial Imaginary, concerns the theoretical and artistic importance of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution to to radical decolonial thought in the Caribbean.
Nathalie Handal
Nathalie Handal is described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” She is the author and/or editor of 10 award winning books, including Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award; the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, and The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, and the Africa Institute, among others. She is professor at New York University, and writes the literary travel column, “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine.
Nazli Artemia
Nazli Artemia is originally from Iran and immigrated to the United States more than a decade ago. She holds an MFA in creative writing and has worked as a fiction editor and Persian translator with several local magazines in the United States. Her fiction has appeared in WLA (War, Literature, and the Arts) journal, and in an anthology named The Third Script. Her recent fiction is under publication by Tint journal. She is currently working on her first novella.
Nelly Rosario
Nelly Rosario is author of Song of the Water Saints, winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Her work appears in various anthologies and journals, including Callaloo, Meridians, Review, Chess Life, and el diario/La Prensa. She conducts research for the MIT Black History Project and collaborates on desveladas, a writing collective engaged in visual conversations across the Americas and winner of a Creative Capital Award in Literature. Rosario is Associate Professor at Williams College.
Nicole Callihan
Nicole Callihan’s most recent book is This Strange Garment, published by Terrapin Books in March 2023. Her other books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as a novella, The Couples. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan. com.
Niloufar Talebi
Born in London to Iranian parents, Niloufar Talebi is an author, award-winning translator, interdisciplinary creator, and producer. She is the editor/translator of Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World (North Atlantic Books, 2008), and author of Self-Portrait in Bloom (l’Aleph, 2019) and creator of its operatic companion, Abraham in Flames, a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Performance of 2019. Her projects have been commissioned by and presented at Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, the Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Stanford Live. She is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, and 5 translations prizes including a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for her translations of Ahmad Shamlou’s poetry. Talebi is a frequent speaker at festivals and conferences. In 2019, she was presented at TedxBerkeley, the Bay Area Book Festival, AWP, and Litquake.
Nimmi Gowrinathan
Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan is a writer, a scholar, and an activist. She is a Professor at the City College of New York, where she founded the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative, a global initiative that draws on in-depth research to inform movement-building around the impact of sexual violence on women's political identities. As a key part of this initiative Dr. Gowrinathan created Beyond Identity: A Gendered Platform for Scholar-Activists, a program that seeks to train immigrants and students of color in identity-driven research, political writing, and activism anchored in a thoughtful analysis of structural violence. She has been an analyst and policy consultant on women's political voice and participation in violence in South Asia for the International Crisis Group, The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, UN Women, and the Asian Development Bank. She provides expert analysis for CNN, MSNBC, AL Jazeera, and the BBC and has been published in Harper's Magazine, Freeman's Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Guernica Magazine among others. Dr. Gowrinathan is the creator of the Female Fighter Series at Guernica Magazine and the Publisher of Adi, a new literary journal to rehumanize policy. Her work, and writings, can be found at www.deviarchy.com. Her book, Radicalizing Her, examines the complex politics of the female fighter (Beacon 2021).
Nívea Castro
Nívea Castro, J.D., is the curator of Sinister Wisdom; Out Latina Lesbians, published July 2015. A Nuyorican lesbiana activist, Nívea is also a writer, photographer, social justice attorney, martial artist, and educator. A Marge Percy Poetry Workshop participant and a VONA alum, her poems and writings have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Word, a Cave Canem chapbook, And Then, Kalyani, Best of Panic, and Stand our Ground. She has appeared and been featured in various venues, including NYC and Brooklyn Lit Crawl, Listen to Your Mother, a national series of live readings by local writers, Crack the Mic, Camaradas, Soul Sister Revue, BAAD!ASS Women Festival, La Pluma y Tinta, New Voices Reading Series, Canvas of Words, and Michfest. She is a member of the New York City Latinas Writers Group. Nívea lives in Brooklyn and is completing a poetry manuscript and an essay/photo chapbook on her recent travels to Cuba. She is working on her upcoming book, Coquito Man. You may read her work and view her photography at www.niveacastro.com. Reach her on Facebook or by email at niv@niveacastro.com.
Noah Turner Meyers
Noah Myers fell in love with the Spanish language and culture of Latin America growing up, of all places, in rural Missouri. During his BA, he studied in Mendoza, Argentina, and later taught English in Tunja, Colombia, before going on to complete his MA in Hispanic Literature from the University of North Carolina. He has published reviews and presented scholarly works about a variety of subjects, with particular interest in contemporary afro-descendent and indigenous writers of Colombia and the Caribbean. This is his first, and he hopes the first of many, literary translations.
Noel Quiñones
Noel Quiñones is an AfroBoricua writer, performer, and educator born and raised in the Bronx. He has received fellowships from Poets House, CantoMundo, and Brooklyn Poets. His poetry will be included in the forthcoming "¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets" published by Arte Publico Press, having already been published in Pilgrimage Press, Winter Tangerine Review, Asymptote, & elsewhere. Noel is the founder of Project X, an arts organization dedicated to uplifting the voice of Bronx and Latinx artists, and the co-founder of Piel Cafe Poetry, an AfroLatino Spoken Word Collective on tour throughout the United States. Visit him at www.elninoquinones.com or @NQNino322
Norma Liliana Valdez
Norma Liliana Valdez is the author of the chapbook Preparing the Body (YesYes Books, 2019). A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and a CantoMundo fellow, her poems appear in Waxwing Literary Journal, The Los Angeles Review, PANK Magazine, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Hedgebrook, Under the Volcano International, and Community of Writers.
Norma Cantú
Dr. Norma Cantú has published articles on a number or academic subjects as well as poetry and fiction. Her publications on border literature, the teaching of English, quinceañera celebration and the matachines, a religious dance tradition have earned her an international reputation as a scholar and folklorist. She has co-edited four books and edited a collection of testimonios by Chicana scientists, mathematicians and engineers. Her award winning Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera chronicles her childhood experiences on the border. She edits the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Culture and Traditions book series at The Texas A&M University Press. As Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and English at UMKC, Cantu’s duties include teaching, committee work, and the development of the Latina and Latino Studies (LLS) Program.
Oindrila Mukherjee
Oindrila Mukherjee has an MFA from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in CreativeWriting from the University of Houston. Oindrila worked as a journalist in Calcutta before moving to the U.S. where she has worked as a fiction and review editor for Gulf Coast journal. Her fiction was most recently published in Indian Voices, an anthology of emerging Indian writers from around the world. She is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University.
Ola Osifo Osaze
Ola Osifo Osaze is a trans masculine queer of Edo and Yoruba descent, who was born in Port Harcourt, Delta State and now resides in Houston, Texas. Ola has been a community activist for many years including co-founding the Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project, working with Transgender Law Center in Oakland, the Audre Lorde Project, Uhuru Wazobia, Queers for Economic Justice and Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Ola is a 2015 Voices of Our Nation Arts workshop (VONA) fellow, and has writings published in Saraba Magazine, Apogee, Qzine, Black Looks and the anthologies Queer African Reader and Queer Africa II. Ola writes to visibilize the myriad journeys and resiliency of queer/trans African migrants, particularly those straddling the worlds of West Africa and North America, and is working on a short story collection that does just that. You learn more about Ola's activism here - https://transgenderlawcenter.org/programs/blmp.
Olivia Walton
Olivia Rose Walton is a writer from South Africa who lives in Istanbul.
Oonya Kempadoo
Oonya Kempadoo is a novelist who was born in the UK of Guyanese parentage.
Oscar Dario Gomez
Oscar Darío Gómez writes short, short stories and works as a publicist in Medellín, Colombia.
Patricia Engel
Patricia Engel is the author of the acclaimed books, Vida and It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris. Her new novel, The Veins of the Ocean, is forthcoming from Grove Press in 2016.
Phoebe Boswell
Phoebe Boswell (b. 1982, Kenya), born in Nairobi to a Kikuyu mother and British Kenyan father, brought up in the Arabian Gulf, and now living and working in London, makes work anchored to a restless state of diasporic consciousness. Combining draftswomanship and digital technology, she creates immersive installations and bodies of work which layer drawing, animation, sound, video, and interactivity in an effort to find new languages robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house, centre, and amplify voices and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised or sidelined as 'other'. Boswell studied at the Slade School of Art and Central St Martins. She is currently the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School at Rome, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and is represented in the United States by Sapar Contemporary, New York. Her work has been widely exhibited: with galleries including Kristin Hjellegjerde, Carroll / Fletcher, and Tiwani Contemporary; art fairs Art15, 1:54, and Expo Chicago; and has screened at Sundance, the London Film Festival, LA Film Festival, Blackstar, Underwire, British Animation Awards, and CinemAfrica amongst others. She participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2015, the Biennial of Moving Images 2016 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, and received the Future Generation Art Prize's Special Prize in 2017, consequently exhibiting as part of the Collateral Events programme at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Purvi Shah
Known for her sparkly eyeshadow and raucous laughter, Purvi Shah inspires change as a non-profit consultant, anti-violence advocate, and writer. She is curious about the power of language as inquiry and understanding, as a bridge between unknowns, as part of the dreamwork of transformation and justice. During the 10th anniversary of 9/11, she directed Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight Asian American voices and experiences. In Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press: 2006), she plumbs migrations and belongings. Her new poetry chaplet, Dark Lip of the Beloved: Sound Your Fiery God-Praise (Belladonna*: 2015), explores the devotions and configurations of women. Recently she was selected for INKTank, a 12-week residency for playwrights hosted by the Rising Circle Theater Collective.
Qwo-li Driskill
Cherokee poet, scholar, and activist Qwo-Li Driskill was raised in rural Colorado. Driskill earned a PhD from Michigan State University. Driskill’s poetry engages themes of inheritance and healing, and is rooted in personal Cherokee Two-Spirit, queer, and mixed-race experience. Walking with Ghosts (2005), Driskill’s first poetry collection, was named Book of the Month by Sable: The LitMag for New Writing and was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Driskill co-edited, with Colin Kennedy Donovan, Scars Tell Stories: A Queer and Trans (Dis)ability Zine (2007), and has work featured in several anthologies, including Beyond Masculinity: Essays by Queer Men on Gender and Politics (2008, edited by Trevor Hoppe) and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (2003, edited by Janice Gould and Dean Rader). The poet is the founder of Dragonfly Rising Press.
Rachel Ann Brickner
Rachel Ann Brickner is a writer from Pittsburgh. In a previous life, she lived and worked in New York City and San Francisco, editing political science and science textbooks. Her fiction has previously appeared in PANK, Corium Magazine, and Burrow Press Review. She's currently at work on a collection of short stories and is accepting that she really truly loves to draw.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
is a poet and photographer. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. A Cave Canem and Kimbilio Fellow, she is the recipient of fellowships including Yaddo, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Millay Colony, and others. In 2011, Griffiths appeared in the first-ever poetry issue in Oprah’s O Magazine. She is widely known for her literary portraits, fine art photography, and lyric videos. Griffiths recently completed her first extensive video project, P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), an intimate series of micro-interviews, which gathers nearly 100 contemporary poets in conversation, is featured online at the Academy of American Poets’ website. Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia, The Requited Distance, and Mule & Pear. Her most recent full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. Currently, Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Rachelle Cruz
Rachelle Cruz is the author of God's Will for Monsters (Inlandia, 2017), which won an American Book Award in 2018 and the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Regional Poetry Prize. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology of Philippine Myths (Carayan Press, 2015) with Lis P. Sipin-Gabon. Her most recent book, Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing and Creating Comics, was published in Fall 2018. She was appointed the 2018-2020 Inlandia Literary Laureate during which founded a summer writing program for young people, Poetry is Power, among other community projects. She lives and writes in Southern California.
Rachel Masilamani
Rachel Masilamani has been making comics since 1997. Her first comics collection, RPM Comics #1, received a grant from the Xeric Foundation and was named “Best Comic Book” by the Baltimore City Paper. Since then, her comics have appeared in Meathaus, Street Runoff, Graphics Classics, The Indiana Review and other anthologies.
Racquel Goodison
Racquel Goodison is on faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She has been a resident at Yaddo, Millay, and the Saltonstall Arts Colony. Additionally, she was a recipient of the Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writers Grant and the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship to the Fine Arts Works Center. Her stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart and can be found in such literary journals as Obsidian, Pleiades, Boston Review, and Drunken Boat. Her chapbook, Skin, was a finalist for the 2013 Goldline Press Fiction Chapbook competition and the winner of the 2015 Creative Justice Press fiction chapbook competition. She is currently completing a collection of short stories.
Radhiyah Ayobami
Radhiyah Ayobami - is Brooklyn-born with Southern roots. She holds a B.A in Africana Studies from Brooklyn College, a MFA in Prose from Mills College, and has received awards from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Currently, she lives with her teenage son in Oakland, California, where she is at work on her first novel and the trees give her poems.
Raina J. León
Dr. Raina J. León, CantoMundo fellow, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra : (dis)locate. She has received numerous fellowships and residencies including the Macdowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of LatinX arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California and a board member of ARISE High School in Oakland.
Raquel Gutierrez
raquel gutiérrez writes personal essays, memoir, art criticism, and poetry. A child of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants, raquel was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona. She/they completed MFAs in Poetry and Non-Fiction from the University of Arizona. raquel runs the tiny press, Econo Textual Objects, which publishes works by QTPOC poets. Her/their poetry and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Open Space, and elsewhere. Her/their first book, Brown Neon (Coffee House Press), will be published in the Spring 2021 and her/their first book of poetry, Southwest Reconstruction (Noemi Press), will be published in 2022.
Raven Jackson
A native of Tennessee, Raven Jackson is a poet and filmmaker currently attending New York University’s Graduate Film Program. A Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the New School’s Writing Program, her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, CALYX, Kweli, Phantom Limb, PANK, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, little violences, is forthcoming from Cutbank Literary Magazine in early 2017. She's currently in production on her fifth short film, Nettles.
Rich Villar
Rich Villar is a poet, essayist, activist, and educator originally from Paterson, New Jersey. His first collection of poems, Comprehending Forever (Willow Books), was a finalist for the 2015 International Latino Book Award. He has been quoted on Latino/a literature and culture by HBO and The New York Times. He is an alum of the VONA/Voices Workshop (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He maintains his personal blog at literatiboricua.com and is a contributor to Latino Rebels and Sofrito For Your Soul.
Rina Garcia Chua
Rina Garcia Chua is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She edited the first anthology of Philippine ecopoetry, Sustaining the Archipelago, published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, and is also the author of several ecocritical essays, short stories, poems, and educational textbooks. Nowadays, she enjoys hiking in the woods of British Columbia as much as she relishes swimming in the warmer corridors of the Pacific Ocean. She also wants to try ice climbing next winter.
Robin Scofield
Robin Scofield, author of And the Ass Saw the Angel and Sunflower Cantos (Mouthfeel Press), has poems appearing in The Malpais Review, The Texas Weather Anthology, and Pilgrimage. Her next full-length collection, Drive, comes out in 2016. She is poetry editor for BorderSenses and writes with the Tumblewords Project in El Paso, where she lives with her husband and her Belgian Shepherd.
Rosa Boshier
Rosa Boshier is a multi-genre writer. Her work can be found in Entropy, e Acentos Review, e Rattling Wall, Necessary Fiction, Ghost Parachute, and New Delta Review, and is forthcoming in e Los Angeles Review of Books. Her plays have been staged at e Getty Center in LA and e Mission Cultural Center for Latino Art in San Francisco. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at e California Institute of the Arts, where she teaches Latinx Studies. She has received support/artist residencies from the Rainin Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation, Bill Graham Foundation, Maker City LA, and Hannacc in Barcelona, Spain.
Rosa Alcalá
Rosa Alcalá is a poet and translator from Paterson, NJ. The New York Times describes her third and most recent book of poetry MyOTHER TONGUE as capturing “the messy emotions and miscommunications that move between languages” and a reminder of “how little precedent there is for honest writing [about mothers and daughters], compared with the epic traditions of fathers and sons.” Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Harper’s, The Nation, Poetry, and American Poetry Review, as well as in the anthologies Best American Poetry (Scribner, 2019 & 21. The recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and runner-up for a PEN Translation Award, she is the editor and co-translator of New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (Kelsey Street Press, 2018). She is currently a Consulting Editor for the University of Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets Series. Her fourth book of poems, YOU, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2024.
Rosamond S. King
Rosamond S. King is a creative and critical writer, performer, and artist whose work is deeply informed by her cultures and communities, by history, and by a sense of play. Her poetry has appeared in more than two dozen journals and anthologies, and her manuscript Rock|Salt|Stone is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. King has performed in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and throughout North America. She is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College and author of the award- winning scholarly book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. Her goal is to make people feel, wonder, and think, in that order.
Ruth Ellen Kocher
Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of Third Voice (Tupelo Press, 2016), Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014), Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014), domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013), Dorset Prize winner and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award, One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003) Green Rose Prize winner, When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2002), and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press 1999) Naomi Long Madgett Prize winner. Her poems have been widely anthologized. She is Professor of English at the University of Colorado where she teaches Poetry, Poetics, and Literature. She is the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UC Boulder.
S. Brook Corfman
S. Brook Corfman is a poet who writes plays, living in a turret in Pittsburgh. This Lambda Literary Fellow's work has appeared in Washington Square, The Journal, Prelude, Ghost Proposal, and OmniVerse, among other places. @sbrookcorfman
Sabreen Kadhim
Sabreen Kadhim is City of Asylum’s poet-in-residence from Iraq. She has published poems widely in Iraqi magazines and newspapers, such as Al-Sabah, Al-Taakhi, and Al-Zamaan newspapers as well as Al-Esbuaya Magazine and Al-Hurra TV. She was the winner of the 3rd UNESCO Poetry Contest in 2011 and jointly won the Iraqi Youth Poetry Festival competition in 2012 (organized by the Culture For All Association). Her debut poetry collection, I Introduce Myself To Water, is awaiting publication.
Sally Wen Mao
Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Mao was a 2016-2017 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the 2017-2018 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University, and a 2021 Black Mountain Institute Shearing fellow.
Sandra Lee
Sandra Lee is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She is working on an interlinked short story collection about members of a Korean American church in Queens.
Sarah Schulman
Sarah Schulman, a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, professor, and journalist, has published seventeen books. Her awards include a Guggenheim, Fulbright in Judaic Studies, two American Library Association Book Awards (fiction and nonfiction), and the Kessler Prize for Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies. She is distinguished professor of the humanities at CUNY, a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace and faculty advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine.
Sarah Hollows
Sarah Hollows is an interdisciplinary artist focusing particularly on performance, relational and social practice. She is interested in both destroying white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and investigating the invisible element that exists/is activated/comes to life once a relationship is initiated or a gesture is received. Recent work includes "HOLDING ON/LETTING GO" and "Settlements," both artistic collaborations with Kris Mason, and "Off the Menu" (not of the menu) an on-going relational experiment imagining and practicing an economy of kindness. Sarah is a graduate student in Intermedia at the University of Maine (Orono) where she also co-runs “Hide and Seek,” a collaboratively run coffee shop/ experimental art station on campus.
Sarah Rifky
Sarah Rifky is an Egyptian writer and curator. She is co-founder of Beirut (2012-2015) an art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo. She is the author of numerous essays of art and other speculative fiction. Currently she is pursuing her PhD in History, Theory and Criticism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is a fellow of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.
Sarah Vap
Sarah Vap is the author of six collections of poetry. Her most recent book, Viability, was selected by Mary Jo Bang for the National Poetry Series and was released by Penguin in 2016. She is the recipient of an NEA Literature fellowship for poetry and a Research Enhancement Fellowship from the University of Southern California for a year of writer and research in West Africa. She lives with her family in Venice, CA.
Saretta Morgan
Saretta Morgan holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Pratt Institute. She is the author of room for a counter interior (2017, Portable Press @ yo-yo labs) and feeling upon arrival (2018, Ugly Duckling Presse).
Sasha Pimentel Chacón
Sasha Pimentel Chacón, a Filipina American poet, was born in Manila and raised in Atlanta, Saudi Arabia and the NYC tri-state region. She is the author of Insides She Swallowed, a collection of poems about immigration, sexuality and hunger, and winner of the 2011 American Book Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals such as The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review and OCHO, and she is the recipient of a Philip Levine Fellowship and the Ernesto Trejo Prize.
Saudamini Deo
Saudamini Deo is a writer and photographer from India.
Sean Gandert
Sean Gandert is the author of the novels American Saint and Lost in Arcadia. Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. A freelance writer and college English instructor, he currently lives in Florida with his wife and an increasingly large pride of cats.
Sejal Shah
Sejal Shah is a queer brown neurodiverse writer of Kenyan, Ugandan, Indian, Gujarati, and American background. She is the author of the essay collection This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press), an NPR Best Book of 2020. “The Girl With Two Brothers” is the opening story of her forthcoming book, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions (West Virginia University Press, 2024). She lives and writes in Western New York.
Shana L. Redmond
A boundaryless writer and scholar, Shana L. Redmond (she/her) is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014) and the award-winning Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020). She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University.
Shavonne Clarke
Shaveonne Clarke writes: I’m a writer/editor and digital strategist living in the D.C. area. In 2013 I graduated from Purdue University’s MFA program in creative writing, where I spent two years as the nonfiction editor of Sycamore Review. My fiction has appeared in Aster(ix) Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Kenyon Review Online.
Shayla Lawz
Shayla Lawz was raised in Jersey City, NJ. She is a graduate of Rutgers University, where she studied English and Philosophy. She writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction that often deals with childhood, color, and the body. Currently, she lives in Providence, RI where she is an MFA candidate in Literary Arts at Brown University. Her work has been featured in Winter Tangerine.
Shay Youngblood
Georgia born writer Shay Youngblood is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris and Soul Kiss (Riverhead Books) and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories (Firebrand Books). Her published plays Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery and Talking Bones, (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Square Blues, Black Power Barbie and Communism Killed My Dog. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, an Edward Albee honoree, several NAACP Theater Awards, an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction and a 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Sustained Achievement Award. Ms. Youngblood received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University and has taught Creative Writing to faculty and graduate students at NYU and has been Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi and Texas A&M Universities. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts sponsored Japan-US Creative Artist Fellowship for 2011.
Sheila Maldonado
Sheila Maldonado is the author of the newly released poetry collection THAT'S WHAT YOU GET (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2021) as well as ONE-BEDROOM SOLO (Fly by Night Press / A Gathering of the Tribes, 2011), her debut poetry collection. She is a CantoMundo fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She teaches English for the City University of New York. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in El Alto Manhattan.
Sima Shakhsari
Sima Shakhsari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Shakhsari was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum (2015-16), and the teaching and research Postdoctoral Fellow in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program at the University of Houston (2010-12). They earned their PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University and have published in Feminist Review, Sexualities, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Transgender Studies II, and Queer Necropolitics. Their book manuscript titled Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke, Fall 2019) provides an analysis of Weblogistan as a site of cybergovernmentality, where simultaneously national and neoliberal gendered subjectivities are produced through online and offline heteronormative disciplining and normalizing techniques.
Soad Suliman
Egyptian journalist and writer, Soad Suliman has written many novels and short story collections, including "Keda bi Basata" (Thus Simply), and the three novels "al-Mobah" (The Permissible), "al-Raqes" (The Dancer), and "Shahwet al-Malayka" (The Angels' Desire). She lives in Cairo.
Stacy Parker Le Melle
Stacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco) and was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s). She chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project. Her essay “Ferry Cross the Mersey” was selected for publication as one of the winners of the 2021 Thornwillow Patrons’ Prize. She currently serves as Executive Editor for W.K.Kellogg Foundation’s Solidarity Council on Racial Equity. In 2020, she was named a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been recently published in Nat. Brut, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road among other publications. She co-founded and curates Harlem’s First Person Plural Reading Series.
Steffan Triplett
Steffan Triplett is a Black, queer writer and educator from Joplin, Missouri. He received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis where he was a John B. Ervin Scholar. Some of Steffan's work can be found in Longreads, Electric Literature, DIAGRAM, Fence, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books 2018), and the forthcoming Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2020). Steffan has been a fellow for Callaloo and Lambda Literary and his work has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and was the winner of the Brutal Nation Prize in Prose. His manuscript-in-progress was Shortlisted for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards.
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
South Texas native Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of All the Agents & Saints: Dispatches from the US Borderlands; Mexican Enough; Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, VQR, Believer, and Oxford American and edited Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. Her coverage of the borderlands won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at UNC-Chapel Hill and can be found at www.StephanieElizondoGriest.com and @SElizondoGriest.
Stephanie Cawley
Stephanie Cawley is a poet from southern New Jersey. She is the author of My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions, 2020), winner of the Slope Book Prize chosen by Solmaz Sharif, and Animal Mineral (forthcoming YesYes Books, 2021), as well as the chapbook A Wilderness (Gazing Grain, 2019). She works at Stockton University.
Sue Rainsford
Sue Rainsford is a writer and researcher based in Dublin.
Sue Scavo
Sue Scavo is a poet, writer and teacher of the dream. She is also the Co-Founder/Editor of Deluge Journal, a literary and arts magazine dedicated to the creative work inspired by the dream or the dream-like realm. Her work has appeared in numerous journals such as Poet Lore and Blue Heron Review and anthologies such as What Have You Lost (ed by Naomi Shihab Nye). As a teacher of Embodied Dreamwork, Sue has taught for over 17 years all around the U.S. and Canada at centers such as Kripalu, Esalen, Breitenbush, and Hollyhock.
Sujatha Fernandes
Sujatha Fernandes is a writer, scholar, and teacher. She is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, where she founded the Racial Justice and the Curriculum Project. Her short stories have appeared in New Ohio Review, Saranac Review, Aster(ix), and The Maine Review. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, The Nation, and forthcoming in Orion Magazine. She is the author of a memoir on a global hip hop life Close to the Edge (Verso), a collection of essays The Cuban Hustle (Duke University Press), and Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling (Oxford). She is an editorial board member of the literary magazine Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora and edited a special issue with Jared Thomas on Bla(c)kness in Australia. She is currently completing a collection of interlinked short stories Shadow People, and a novel Beyond the Monsoon Mountains.
Tanya Pérez-Brennan
Tanya Pérez-Brennan is based in Boston and works as a Spanish interpreter/translator, specializing in medical and legal terminology. She is also a freelance journalist, having served as a regular contributor to Foxnewslatino.com and The Boston Globe, and as a former staff writer for The Orlando Sentinel and The Florida Times-Union. Her poems have been published in Zalacain, The Harvard Journal of Ibero America and in Liberation Poetry: An Anthology (Trilingual Press, 2012). Tanya has a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University and an MFA from Bennington College. She is finishing her first novel, a mother-daughter story set in Colombia.
Tara Isabel Zambrano
Tara Isabel Zambrano is the author of Death, Desire And Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. Her flash fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Best Micro Fiction 2019, 2020 Anthology. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.
Anonymous
The Ferrante Project: A collective of 16 women writers of color experimenting with freedom, anti-fame, and anonymity. Contributors include: Cathy Linh Che, Angie Cruz, Natalie Díaz, Ru Freeman, Sarah Gambito Cristina García, Jamey Hatley, Dawn Lundy Martin, Ayana Mathis, Vi khi nao, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Deborah Paredez, Khadijah Queen, Emily Raboteau, Paisley Rekdal, and Lyrae Van Clief- Stefanon.
Tiphanie Yanique
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. It was also listed by NPR as one of the Best Book of 2014 and became a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Tiphanie’s collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35. Her writing has also won the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is an associate professor at Wesleyan University. She lives in New Rochelle, New York with her husband, teacher and photographer Moses Djeli, and their three children.
Toni Plummer
Toni Margarita Plummer is the author of the story collection The Bolero of Andi Rowe. She was a finalist for the inaugural Tomas Rivera Book Prize and won Honorable Mention for the 2019 Reynolds Price Prize in Fiction given by the Center for Women Writers. A Macondo Fellow and graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC, she is a contributor to the anthologies East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte and Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity. After working in NYC book publishing for a decade, she now lives in the Hudson Valley.
Vanessa Mártir
Vanessa Mártir is a NYC-based writer, educator, and mama. She is completing her memoir, Relentless, and chronicles her journey in her blog (vanessamartir.wordpress.com). A five-time VONA/Voices fellow, Mártir now serves as the organization’s Workshop Director and newsletter editor. Her essays have appeared in The Butter, Poets & Writers Magazine, Kweli Journal, and the VONA/Voices Anthology, Dismantle, among others. In 2011, Mártir created the Writing Our Lives Workshop, through which she’s led hundreds of writers through the process of writing personal essay. She has penned two novels, Woman’s Cry (Augustus Publishing, 2007) and The Right Play (unpublished); and co-wrote Do Something!: A Handbook for Young Activists (Workman Publishing, 2010).
Vanessa Pérez
Vanessa Pérez is an Associate Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and the editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement. She serves as an associate investigator on the City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB), a collaborative project of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Vanita Reddy
Vanita Reddy is an Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her articles have appeared in the journals South Asian Popular Culture, Contemporary Literature, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is the author of Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Temple UP, 2016), one of the first books to consider beauty and fashion as a point of entry into an examination of South Asian diasporic public cultures. She is also co-editing an issue of Scholar and Feminist Online called “Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations,” which is forthcoming in Fall 2017
Vi Khi Nao
VI KHI NAO is the author of seven poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her book, Suicide: the Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche will be out of 11:11 in Spring 2023. A recipient of the 2022 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute: https://www.vikhinao.com
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
Vidhu Aggarwal
Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and graphic media, and draw mythic schemas from popular culture and ancient texts. Her poetry book The Trouble with Humpadori (2016) imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized transnational subjects. Poems from Humpadori were listed in the top 25 from Boston Review in 2016 and appeared on Sundress Publications Best Poetry of 2016 list. Avatara, a chapbook from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.s play at being gods. A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, she teaches at Rollins College.
Winson Law
Winson Law (he/him) is an emerging writer of fiction and poetry. He has mentored youth in juvenile detention through the Pongo Project Project and served as a board member for Seattle City of Literature. He resides in the Seattle area and has previously worked in technology, nonprofit, and bakeries. With a degree in geography from Middlebury College and knowledge of multiple languages, he seeks the eccentric and universal in his writing. Reach out via winsonklaw.com
Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro
Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is a Puerto Rican writer. She's published books that promote the discussion of Afroidentity and sexual diversity. She is the Director of the Department of AfroPuertoRican Studies, a performative project of Creative Writing based at the Casa Museo Ashford in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is also the founder and chair of Ancestral Black Women, in response to the call by UNESCO to celebrate the International Decade for People of African Descent. She was invited by the UN to speak about women, slavery and creativity in 2015 as part of the Remembering Slavery Program. Her short story collection Las negras, winner of the 2013 National Short Story Prize from the PEN Club of Puerto Rico, explores the limits of the development of female characters who challenge hierarchies of power. Caparazones, Lesbofilias and Violeta are some of her works which explore transgression from an openly visible lesbianism. She has also won the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture Prize in 2012 and 2015, and the National Award from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 2008. Her work has been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Portuguese.
Youmna Chlala
Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut and currently based in New York. Her book of poetry, The Paper Camera, is forthcoming from Litmus Press. She is the founding editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in publications such as Guernica, Prairie Schooner and the MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies. She has exhibited widely, including in the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and The Drawing Center, and participated in the Performa Biennial 11, Jerusalem Show IV, and the 1st Brooklyn Biennial. She is the co-founder of the Mutating Cities Institute and Associate Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies Department at the Pratt Institute.
Yvette Benavides
Yvette Benavides is a professor of English and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. She is a book critic for the San Antonio Express News and a contributor on Texas Public Radio.
Yvonne Onakeme Etaghene
Yvonne Onakeme Etaghene is an Ijaw Urhobo Nigerian dyke poet, performer, author, dancer, playwright, visual artist and fashion designer. Etaghene is the author of For Sizakele, a novel that addresses African lesbian/bisexual identity, love, intimate partner violence, and gender. Etaghene’s mixed media visual art has been featured in four solo art exhibitions. Yvonne has published five poetry chapbooks, the latest of which, skin into verse: a remix, was published in 2021. Etaghene is the host of the NIGERIAN DYKE REALNESS Podcast and the founder of Ankara Queen by Yv. Etaghene, a Nigerian fashion, clothing and accessories line. Yvonne received a B.A. from Oberlin College, a Master’s from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Antioch University. www.myloveisaverb.com
Zohra Saed
Zohra Saed is a co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press). Her essays on the Central Asian diaspora and their food history have appeared in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU Press), and in The Asian American Literary Review. Misspelled Cities/ Falsch geschriebene Stadte: Sahar Muradi and Zohra Saed, a bilingual English/German chapbook, was published for documenta13. She is the co-founder and editor of Brooklyn’s Upset Press. As part of her work on Central Asian literatures she is translating Turkestani poems from the early twentieth century.