Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was published in March 2021 and was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, the New York Times Book Review and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
Robert Balun is an adjunct professor at the City College of New York, where he teaches creative writing and literature. He is the author of the poetry collections Acid Western (The Operating System) and Traces (Ursus Americanus Press). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Prelude, Barrow Street, Apogee and others. Robert’s first collection of scholarship, An Ethics of Thinking and Making in the Anthropocene: The Aesthetics of Disruption, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2024. He is also a union delegate for City College and a PhD student in English at Stony Brook University.
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023). A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, APR and Best American Experimental Writing, among other journals and anthologies. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she helps out at Open Books: A Poem Emporium and—with Luther Hughes and Dujie Tahat—cohosts the podcast The Poet Salon. She teaches occasionally through a variety of institutions, including the Rosenbach Museum, Tin House and the University of Washington center in Rome. Follow her on Twitter (@GabrielleBates) + IG (@gabrielle_bates_).
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artists Corps, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts. Her work appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America, the Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Tin House, Guernica and Electric Literature, among other places. Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC, and her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured on Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, which appeared on Paramount Network, MTV Networks, The Smithsonian Channel and VH1, among many other places. In January 2023, she performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day as part of “We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust.”
Born in ’77 and raised in Croatia, living in Brooklyn since ’97, Ana Božičević is a poet, translator, teacher and occasional singer. She is the author of Povratak lišća / Return of the Leaves, Selected Poems in Croatian (Hrvatsko Društvo Pisaca, 2020); Joy of Missing Out (Birds, LLC, 2017); the Lambda Award–winning Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC, 2013); and Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009). Božičević received her MFA in poetry from Hunter College. At the PhD program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, she studied New American poetics and alternative art schools and communities and edited lectures by Diane di Prima for Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She has read, taught and performed at Art Basel, Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Bowery Poetry Club, Brooklyn Poets, Harvard University, Naropa University, San Francisco State University Poetry Center, the Sorbonne, Third Man Records, University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Watermill Center. Her poetry workshops explore the poetic image, performance and the lyric, and blur the disciplinary boundaries between poetry and the visual arts, film, music, architecture and design. Her next book, New Life, is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2023.
Melissa Broder is the author of three collections of poems, Scarecrone (Publishing Genius, 2014), Meat Heart (Publishing Genius, 2012) and When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother (Ampersand Books, 2010). By day she works as a publicity manager at Penguin. She holds a BA in English from Tufts University and an MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York, which awarded her the Stark Prize for Poetry and the Jerome Lowell Dejur award. A past editor of La Petite Zine and the curator of the Polestar Poetry Series at Cakeshop, Broder blogs at HTMLGIANT and maintains a rad Twitter @melissabroder.
J. Scott Brownlee’s first full-length book, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, was selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Highway or Belief, which won the 2013 Button Poetry Prize, and Ascension, which won the 2014 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. A former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University, Brownlee is a founding member of the Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory and the aesthetically marginalized working class, both in the United States and abroad. After living in Brooklyn for several years, he currently works for the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is an admissions counselor for the Executive MBA Program.
Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), Aging (2018) and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White, 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, the American Poetry Review and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Her novella, The Couples, was published by Mason Jar Press in summer 2019. Nicole has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and Bethany Arts. A frequent collaborator with artists and composers around the world, Nicole’s work has been translated into Spanish, German, Arabic, and Russian.
Cea / (Constantine Jones) is an interdisciplinary Greek-American thingmaker. They are a member of the Artist+ Registry at Visual AIDS, where they also work as the Oral History Project Liaison, and a member of the collective What Would An HIV Doula Do? They facilitate creative writing workshops at the City College of New York, Brooklyn Poets, Liminal Lab and elsewhere. They are the author of the hybrid text In Still Rooms (The Operating System, 2020) and a collaborative chapbook with Portuguese visual artist Vicente Sampaio, BALEEN: A Poem In Twelve Days (Ursus Americanus, 2021). Their work has been performed or exhibited at various venues across NYC and Tennessee.
Imani Cezanne is a Black writer, performer and tamale connoisseur living in Oakland, CA. With her roots in spoken word and poetry slam, Cezanne brings a unique experience and background to the publishing world. In March of 2020 she became the Woman of the World Poetry Slam Champion for the second time. In July of the same year she was named a finalist for the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. A two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, Cezanne has work published in Poetry, Prism and Nimrod, among other venues. She is the recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s 2020 Writer’s Corp Teaching Artist in Residence Grant, a $40,000 award granted for three years to create spoken word poetry programming in San Francisco. Throughout her teaching career, Cezanne has taught creative writing and spoken word in high schools and universities across the country. She has also coached poetry slam teams at San Francisco State University, Mills College, American University and Georgetown University. While all are welcome to enjoy her work, Cezanne writes for Black people and Black readers and is committed to the liberation of all oppressed people.
Wo Chan, who performs as the Illustrious Pearl, is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of TogethernessBook link opens in a new window (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in Poetry, Wussy, No Tokens and the Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts and elsewhere. They live in Brooklyn, New York. Find them at @theillustriouspearlTwitter link opens in a new window.
Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever, Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion and the chapbooks Spooky Action at a Distance and The Book of Thirteen. For more than a decade he worked as an art critic, columnist and cultural commentator in Las Vegas, where he served as a poetry consultant for the Cultural Affairs Division. He was awarded a Nevada Arts Council Fellowship in Literary Arts and holds an MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York, where he won the 2006 Marie Ponsot Poetry Prize. From 2010 to 2014 he cocurated the Earshot reading series and from 2011 to 2015 he coedited the online poetry journal Lyre Lyre. Currently he is the poetry editor for Bowery Gothic and an adjunct assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he teaches creative writing.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of seven collections of poems. Hotel Oblivion, her seventh collection, was published in the spring of 2022 by Four Way Books; Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in 2019; and The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an examination of Freudian melancholia and the working class, was published by Repeater Books in 2021. Forthcoming in 2023 are a novella, Steady Diet of Nothing; a collection of poems, Back to the Woods; and a book on the working class and negative freedom. Cruz is pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the European Graduate School.
Imani Davis is a queer Black writer from Brooklyn. A Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, they’ve earned fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lambda Literary, BOAAT Press and the Stadler Center for Poetry. They completed their BA in English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and they’re currently pursuing a PhD in American Studies at Harvard. Imani has been facilitating workshops and poetry courses for over six years. Their poetry appears in Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net, PBS NewsHour’s Brief But Spectacular series, Poetry Daily, Shade Literary Arts, the Offing, Adroit Journal and elsewhere.
Starr Davis is a poet and essayist whose work has been featured in multiple literary venues such as the Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Catapult, and the Rumpus. Previously a 2021–2022 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, a 2023 Fellow for the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the creative nonfiction editor for TriQuarterly, she holds an MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York and a BA in journalism and creative writing from the University of Akron. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthologies in poetry and creative nonfiction, Best of the Net and Best American Essays.
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in Narrative, Leveler, Small Orange and other places. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Most recently, she received a Poets & Writers BIPOC grant, and she has been named a finalist for the Frontier Digital Poetry Chapbook Award, the June Jordan Fellowship, Narrative‘s Annual Poetry Prize and Palette‘s Spotlight Award. Isabella holds an MFA from Columbia University and currently resides in New Jersey.
Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books, 2015), named one of the top debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers, and the chapbook The Rest of the Body (YesYes Books, 2017). A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the winner of the Scotti Merrill Memorial Award and Narrative‘s Annual Poetry Contest, he has also received fellowships from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri and the Key West Literary Seminar. His poems have recently appeared in Denver Quarterly, Washington Square, LARB Quarterly Journal and Horsethief. He holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and he has taught workshops for Poets House, the Academy of American Poets, Rutgers and the MFA program at Columbia University.
Natalie Eilbert is the author of Indictus (Noemi Press, 2018), winner of the 2016 Noemi Press Book Award in Poetry, Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015) and the chapbooks Conversation with the Stone Wife (Bloof Books, 2014) and And I Shall Again Be Virtuous (Big Lucks, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, jubilat and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016–17 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an NEA fellowship. is the founding editor of the Atlas Review.
Laura Eve Engel is the author of Things That Go (Octopus Books, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, her work can be found in the Nation, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, PEN America, Tin House and elsewhere. She has taught courses in creative writing, literature and composition at the University of Houston, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Fordham University, among other places, and for ten years she worked with high-school-age writers and new teachers at the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop, where she served as residential program director from 2012 to 2017. A musician in the off-hours, she’s one half of a band called The Old Year.
Shira Erlichman is a poet, musician and visual artist. She was born in Israel and immigrated to the US when she was six. Her poems explore recovery—of language, of home, of mind—and value the “scattered wholeness” of healing. She earned her BA at Hampshire College and has been awarded the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe and a residency by the Millay Colony. Her work has been featured in the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, Huffington Post, Seattle Times and New York Times, among other publications. Her debut poetry book, Odes to Lithium, was published by Alice James Books in September 2019. She is also the author and illustrator of the picture book Be/Hold (Penny Candy Books, 2019). She has taught for Urban Word NYC, the Volume Summer Institute and York College–CUNY, and she has been teaching online poetry classes via her company Freer Form for the last nine years. She lives in Brooklyn.
Bernard Ferguson (they/them) is a Bahamian poet and essayist. By great luck, they’re the winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award and the 2019 92Y Discovery Contest, among other awards. Their work has been supported by NYU’s Global Research Initiative, New York’s Writers in the Public Schools, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. By the kindness of friends and editors, their work has been featured, published or is forthcoming in the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Paris Review, Georgia Review and elsewhere. Ferguson has taught creative writing at New York University and numerous New York public schools and currently teaches creative writing at the New School.
Ariel Francisco is the author of A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020), All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016). His work has been published by the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, New York City Ballet and many other venues. A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, he earned his MFA at Florida International University and is a visiting professor in the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Joanna Fuhrman, an assistant teaching professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, is the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). Her seventh book, Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press in 2024. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including the Believer, the Baffler, Conduit, Denver Quarterly and on the Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day) websites, and in numerous anthologies including the 2011 Pushcart Prize anthology. Her poem “Lavender” was featured on the Slowdown podcast. She also creates poetry videos that are on her own Vimeo site and in literary journals. In the fall of 2022, after publishing with them since she was a teenager, she became a coeditor at Hanging Loose Press.
Danielle Gasparro is a Brooklyn-based wordsmith, songsmith and teaching artist. She holds an MFA in poetry from New England College and a BA in creative writing with honors from Florida State University. Her poetry and essays have been published in the Daily Palette, Chronogram, Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, the Red Wheelbarrow and elsewhere. Prior to 2018, Gasparro devoted nearly twenty years to performing, recording and building an avid following as a nationally touring singer-songwriter. The obtaining of her MFA signaled a shift in artistic focus to her long-term work as a writer, and Gasparro is currently developing a hybrid memoir that fuses poetry, nonfiction and photography. A passionate educator, Gasparro regularly presents poetry talks and workshops in partnership with public libraries and arts organizations throughout New York’s Hudson River Valley. A regional library tour of her popular poetry-demystifying program is slated to launch in the Northeast in the spring of 2023. On occasion, Gasparro still performs her music live, as curated with her poetry into a dynamic solo concert experience presented exclusively in intimate, piano-centered spaces: “An Evening of Voice & Verse.”
Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star, which NPR calls “a hard, harrowing look into inner space,” the essay collection Sunshine State, as well as two chapbooks, BFF and Things I Told My Mother. Her short fiction, essays, interviews and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine‘s “The Cut,” Joyland, the Paris Review Daily, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School, teaches writing in New York and writes a monthly column on artists’ notebooks for Hazlitt. She lives in Ditmas Park.
Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of Night Swim (2022), winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest. She is editor-in-chief of Harbor Review, a Brooklyn Poets Mentor and poet laureate of Milford, CT. Joan’s work has won or been finalist for several prizes, including the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, the Subnivean Award and the Lumiere Review Award. Joan’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, the Margins, Rhino, Rattle, Dialogist and elsewhere.
Jessica Greenbaum’s first book, Inventing Difficulty, was awarded the Gerald Cable Prize and praised by George Steiner as a “first book by a poet very much to be listened to.” Her second book, The Two Yvonnes, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and recognized by Library Journal as one of the Best Books of Poetry in 2012. Her most recent book, Spilled and Gone, was recognized by the Boston Globe as a Best Book of 2021. She is the coeditor of the anthologies Mishkan Haseder: A Passover Haggadah and Tree Lines: 21st century American Poems. A recipient of awards from the NEA and PSA, she teaches inside and outside academia, including at Barnard College, Vassar, Dorot’s UWS senior center and both Central Synagogue and Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. As a social worker she has also taught poetry with communities who have experienced trauma.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books, 2015), Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books, 2010), The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011) and Mule & Pear (New Issues, 2011), which was awarded the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Librarian Association. The recipient of fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Millay Colony and Vermont Studio Center, her visual and literary work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets & Writers, Mosaic, Folio, American Poet and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Carroll Gardens.
Julie Hart, named Brooklyn Poets’ Yawper of the Year in 2015, has had her work published in various journals, most recently in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Juniper, Rogue Agent, Noble/Gas Qtrly, and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology. She holds an MPhil in history from NYU and taught English as a second language for fifteen years. In 2014, she cofounded Sweet Action Poetry Collective with Mirielle Clifford, and with the help of Emily Blair it has become a vibrant community of poets, featuring bimonthly workshops, annual readings and publications to promote the group’s work.
Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and I Am Made to Leave I Am Made to Return (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Apogee, Hyperallergic and Poets & Writers, among other journals, and in the anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2016 and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. She is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets and Cave Canem. Helal received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn.
Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator of Weiße Schatten / White Shadows: Anneliese Hager (Atelier Éditions, 2023). Carlie’s honors include the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review poetry prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award, and her work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents and other publications. Carlie lives in Brooklyn, where she edits Small Orange Journal. She is a lecturer of creative writing at the State University of New York at Purchase.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Migrant Psalms (Northwestern University Press, 2021) and Stepmotherland, forthcoming from Notre Dame Press in 2022. He is also the coauthor of PRIME: Poetry & Conversations, an Over the Rainbow List selection by the American Library Association, and the coeditor of Happiness, The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, published to commemorate the United Nations International Day of Happiness. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing, the CP Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas, and the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize from Northwestern University Press. His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing and elsewhere in print and online. He is an assistant professor of creative writing and playwriting at Medgar Evers College—CUNY and also teaches as part of the arts faculty at NYU Gallatin.
JP Howard is the author of SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System, 2016), a 2016 Lambda Literary finalist, and bury your love poems here (Belladonna*, 2015), as well as coeditor of Sinister Wisdom Journal Black Lesbians: We Are the Revolution! (2018). She has received a Lambda Emerging Writer Award and was a finalist for the 2017 Split This Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, and she is a 2020 featured author in Lambda Literary’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools program. The winner of fellowships from Cave Canem, VONA and Lambda, she curates the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon and has facilitated numerous writing workshops for Apogee, the Brooklyn Community Pride Center, Brooklyn Poets, City College and others. Howards holds a BA in English from Barnard College, a JD from Brooklyn Law School and an MFA in creative writing from City College.
Emily Wallis Hughes grew up in Agua Caliente, California, a small town in the Sonoma Valley. Sugar Factory, her first book of poems, which includes a series of twelve paintings by Sarah Riggs in conversation with Emily’s poems, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2019 and a finalist for the Fence Modern Poets Series and the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Her poems have been published in Berkeley Poetry Review, Luna Luna, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prelude and many other venues. She coedited Jure Detela’s Moss & Silver, translated by Raymond Miller with Tatjana Jamnik (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), which was a finalist for Three Percent’s 2019 Best Translated Book Award. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow, and an MA in creative writing and English literature from the University of California–Davis. Emily is an editor at Fence, where she edits Elecment, coedits the Constant Critic and directs the distribution of Fence. She has taught creative writing at New York University and the University of California–Davis as well as California community colleges and New York City public elementary schools. She currently teaches creative writing as an adjunct instructor at Rutgers–New Brunswick in New Jersey and lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This summer she became certified as a NOLS Wilderness First Responder.
Luther Hughes is the author of the debut poetry collection A Shiver in the Leaves, forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2022, and the chapbook Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is the founder of Shade Literary Arts, a literary organization for queer writers of color, and cohosts the Poet Salon podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. He is the recipient of a 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. Hughes has mentored and taught at several universities and institutions, including Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA in poetry. He was born and raised in the South End of Seattle, where he currently lives.
Emily Hunt is a poet, artist, educator and arts professional. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and is the author of the poetry collection Dark Green (The Song Cave, 2015), named a “Must-Read Poetry Debut” by Lit Hub. Her most recent works are Company (The Song Cave, 2019), a poetry chapbook, and Cousins (Cold Cube Press, 2019), a book of photographs. Hunt has been a visiting writer at the University of Richmond, Reed College and UC Santa Cruz, and has taught writing at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, Westfield State University, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Omnidawn Publishing, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop and elsewhere. She has worked for a variety of museums and arts nonprofits, including the Poetry Society of America, the Poetry Foundation, the Contemporary Jewish Museum and Action Books.
Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry: Leadbelly, a 2004 National Poetry Series winner; and Olio, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry. Olio also received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. For his work Jess has been awarded an NEA fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Illinois Arts Council fellowship, and has won a Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting award. A Cave Canem and NYU alum, Jess is a professor of English at the College of Staten Island–CUNY.
Modesto “Flako” Jimenez is a Dominican-born actor, writer and arts educator raised in Brooklyn. He is the author of the poetry collection Oye, Para Mi Querido Brooklyn (Listen, For My Dear Brooklyn) and has performed on stage with the Wooster Group and Repertorio Español in New York. He starred in the lead role in Alexandra Collier’s Take Me Home, an immersive theater piece set inside a cab (which he drove), garnering rave reviews from the New York Times, the New Yorker and Time Out New York. Board Vice President of Brooklyn Poets, Jimenez is also the founder and executive director of Oye Group, an eclectic artist collective presenting annual showcases of new work in theater, dance, poetry and film that spark dialogues on critical issues of immigration, economics and urban survival.
Vanessa Jimenez Gabb is the author of the poetry collections Basic Needs (Rescue Press, 2021) and Images for Radical Politics (Rescue Press, 2016), which was the Editor’s Pick in the 2015 Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize contest. She is a graduate of Poly Prep Country Day School in NYC and Tufts University, and she received an MA in English from St. John’s University and an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was the recipient of the 2010 Himan Brown Award in Poetry. From 2012 to 2015, she copublished the literary project Five Quarterly, and she has taught English and writing at St. John’s University and Newark Academy and workshops for Brooklyn Poets, the International Women’s Writing Guild and the Geneva Writers Group. Currently, she runs the literary arm of the arts & literary consulting company Collective Consciousness NYC, Inc, where she offers writing coaching and editing services. Of Belizean and Colombian descent, she is from and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist and music journalist. She is a graduate fellow with the Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat and Brooklyn Poets. I.S. hosts a month-long online poetry workshop every April called the Singing Bullet. She is the coeditor of The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is an editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelanced for Complex, Revolt TV, NBC News THINK and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, the Rumpus, the Offing and elsewhere. Her poem “Vanity” was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She received her MFA in poetry at UW–Madison, where she was the inaugural 2019–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellow and is the 2021–2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. She is the director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory, a community-driven contemporary arts center in Madison, Wisconsin. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound. She is currently the editor-in-chief of Frontier Poetry.
Patricia Spears Jones is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 2015) and four chapbooks, as well as two plays commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines, the acclaimed experimental theater company. She is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the NY Community Trust and the Goethe Institute, as well as grants from the NEA and NYFA. She has taught poetry workshops for Cave Canem, the Poetry Project and Poets House and is currently a lecturer at LaGuardia Community College.
renée kay (they/them) is a queer poet in Western Massachusetts by way of Brooklyn, Appalachia and other beautiful, strange places. Their work can be found in Copper Nickel, HAD, Catapult and elsewhere, and they were recently selected as a semifinalist for Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Contest. They graduated from the University of Tennessee with a BS in Quantitative Methods in Economics and Math. In lieu of continuing with higher-ed, they chose an ongoing MFA of engagement and have been lucky enough to learn from Jay Desphande, Natalie Eilbert, Shira Erlichman, Paul Tran and others. In 2020, they worked with Angel Nafis in Catapult’s year-long poetry intensive. They currently serve as deputy director at Brooklyn Poets.
Simone Kearney is a New York based writer and artist. She is the author of Days (Belladonna Press, 2020), My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and In Threes, a limited-edition artist chapbook (Minute BOOKS, 2013). She was a 2014 recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a 2010 recipient of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her work often involves collaboration and the translation of content across media. Two recent collaborative and interdisciplinary projects include a combination of text, still photography and video: “One Sings, The Other Doesn’t” (Precog Magazine, 2020), with the artist and writer Xiaofu Effy Wang: and “Desire Lines,” a performative translation of the philosopher Sara Ahmed’s work into movement and material, with the artist and scholar Sophie Seita, performed at Boston University in the spring of 2020. She has exhibited her artwork and/or given multidisciplinary performances in New York, Boston, Connecticut, Baltimore, Ohio, London and Cork. Most recently, her work was on view at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery in the Lower East Side. She teaches at Parsons School of Design and Rutgers University.
Named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine, Jason Koo is the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets and creator of the Bridge. A second-generation Korean American poet, he is the author of the poetry collections More Than Mere Light, America’s Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island and coeditor of the Brooklyn Poets Anthology. The winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and New York State Writers Institute, he earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is an associate teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac University and lives in Beacon, NY.
Debora Kuan is the author of XING (Saturnalia) and Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, the New Republic, Michigan Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA and other magazines. She has worked on the editorial masthead of Poetry magazine and has taught at the 92nd Street Y as a teaching artist. She has also written about mental health and the mind-body connection for the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. She is currently the poet laureate of Wallingford, CT, where she lives with her family.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of Milk (Wave, 2018), Rome (Norton/Liveright, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave, 2012), Black Life (Wave, 2010) and Awe (Wave, 2007). She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Poetry Is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), and coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013). She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, an EdM in arts in education from Harvard and an EdD in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She served as a Brooklyn Poets board director for two years.
Seth Leeper is a queer poet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sycamore Review, River Styx, Salamander, the Account, and Always Crashing. A 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, he holds an MA in special education from Pace University and BA in creative writing and fashion journalism from San Francisco State University. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn, NY. He tweets @sethwleeper.
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, forthcoming March 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including the Nation, Ploughshares, Waxwing and the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology. The recipient of Poetry’s 2021 Bess Hokin Prize as well as fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman and others, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a poetry editor at the Adroit Journal.
Kyle Liang is the son of Taiwanese and Malaysian immigrants. His debut full-length collection, Good Son, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications (2024). He is the author of the chapbook How to Build a House (winner of the 2017 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest), and his work has appeared in Best of the Net among other places. He is an adjunct professor at Quinnipiac University, a teacher for Brooklyn Poets and a physician assistant in internal medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. Kyle lives in New York City with his wife, Morgan.
Grace Shuyi Liew is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Careen (Noemi Press, 2019) and the chapbooks Book of Interludes (Anomalous Press, 2016) and Prop (Ahsahta Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in West Branch, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She is a Watering Hole fellow and contributing editor for Waxwing. Her honors include the Lucille Clifton Poetry Fellowship from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, an Aspen Summer Words scholarship and the Ahsahta Press Chapbook Prize 2016, among others. She holds a BA in philosophy from Hamilton College and an MFA in creative writing from Northern Arizona University. She has taught as an instructor at Northern Arizona University and Louisiana State University and as a teaching artist in various K–12 schools.
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a Best of the Net– and Pushcart-nominated poet, editor, organizer and educator. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered reading series partnered with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that raises funds for transnational relief efforts, bail funds and mutual aid organizations, and he serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, he has taught at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Polyphony Lit’s Summer Editorial Apprenticeship Program and for community programming throughout New York City. His work has appeared or will soon in the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, North American Review and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two cats.
dawn lonsinger is the author of Whelm— winner of the Idaho Prize in Poetry, Cornell’s Freund Prize, and a Shelf Unbound Notable Book of the Year. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Guernica, Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. Lyric essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review. She is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. She has also won the Scowcroft Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards and four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. lonsinger holds a BA in studio art and English as well as an MA in literature from Bucknell University, an MFA in poetry from Cornell University and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. She is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at Muhlenberg College, where she was recently awarded the the Paul C. Empie ’29 Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Sheila Maldonado is the author of one-bedroom solo (Fly by Night Press, 2011) and that’s what you get, forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and as a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the US State Department. She teaches creative writing for the City University of New York and holds degrees in English from Brown University and poetry from the City College of New York. She grew up in Coney Island and lives in Washington Heights.
Taylor Mali is a a spoken word poet, teacher advocate and game designer. A four-time National Poetry Slam champion and one of the original poets on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, he is the author of six books of poetry, including Late Father & Other Poems, and a book of essays on teaching. He is the founding curator of the Page Meets Stage reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club and the inventor of Metaphor Dice, a game that helps writers think more figuratively. He lives in Brooklyn.
David Tomas Martinez’s debut collection of poetry, Hustle (Sarabande Books, 2014), won the New England Book Festival’s prize in poetry. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares and Oxford American, among many other journals, and he has been featured or written about in Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, NPR’s All Things Considered and other venues. A Bread Loaf and CantoMundo Fellow, Martinez received his MFA from San Diego State University and is currently a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Houston, where he is the Reviews and Interviews Editor for Gulf Coast. He lives in Clinton Hill.
Monica McClure’s debut collection, Tender Data, was published by Birds, LLC in 2015. She is also the author of the chapbooks Mood Swing (Snacks Press, 2013) and Mala (Poor Claudia, 2014). She studied fiction, poetry, art history and literary theory at DePauw University and earned her MFA in poetry from New York University. With Brenda Shaughnessy, she is currently editing the anthology Both and Neither: Biracial American Writers.
Joshua Mehigan’s first book, The Optimist, was a finalist for the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book, Accepting the Disaster, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014 and cited as a best book of the year in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement and other publications. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review and Poetry, which awarded him its 2013 Levinson Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Mehigan has taught English and creative writing at Brooklyn College, College of Staten Island and other CUNY schools and is a faculty member of Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. He was an artist-in-residence at Northwestern University from 2017 to 2020. He lives in Windsor Terrace.
John Murillo is the author of Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020). His honors include two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a Pushcart Prize, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Cave Canem Foundation and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as American Poetry Review and Poetry and the Best American Poetry anthologies in 2017 and 2019. He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. He lives in Brooklyn.
Angel Nafis is a Cave Canem Fellow and the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in the BreakBeat Poets Anthology, Buzzfeed Reader, the Rumpus, Poetry and more. She represented NYC at the National Poetry Slam and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. An Urban Word NYC mentor, and founder, curator and host of the Greenlight Poetry Salon, she is the recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a 2017 NEA creative writing fellowship. She is half of the ODES FOR YOU TOUR with poet, musician and visual artist Shira Erlichman, and with poet Morgan Parker she runs the Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo.
Miller Oberman’s first book, The Unstill Ones, a collection of original poems and Old English translations, was chosen by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and published in the fall of 2017. A former Ruth Lilly Fellow as well as a 2016 winner of the 92nd St Y’s Boston Review/Discovery Prize, his translation of selections from the “Old English Rune Poem” won Poetry’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation in 2013. Oberman’s poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, Harvard Review, Tin House and the Nation. He has taught workshops in poetry, poetics and fiction at Georgia College and the University of Connecticut, where he completed his PhD in English. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, rock singer Louisa Rachel Solomon of the Shondes.
Joe Pan is the author of two collections of poetry, Hiccups (Augury Books, 2015) and Autobiomythography & Gallery (BAP, 2011). He is the editor-in-chief and publisher of Brooklyn Arts Press, serves as the fiction editor for the arts magazine Hyperallergic and is the founder of the services-oriented activist group Brooklyn Artists Helping. His piece “Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper,” a hybrid work on drones, was excerpted and praised in the New York Times. In 2015 Pan participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space artist residency program on Governors Island. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and now lives in Williamsburg.
V. Penelope Pelizzon is the author of two books of poetry: Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time (Waywiser, 2014) and Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000), winner of the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. She is also the author of Human Field, winner of the Center for Book Arts 2012 poetry chapbook award, and co-author of Tabloid, Inc.: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives (Ohio State University Press, 2010). Her awards include an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship and a “Discovery”/The Nation Award. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
Xandria Phillips is a writer, educator and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xandria has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Their poetry has been featured in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and BOMB. Xandria’s poem “For a Burial Free of Sharks” won the GIGANTIC Sequins Poetry Contest judged by Lucas de Lima. Xandria’s chapbook Reasons for Smoking won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Their first book, HULL, was published by Nightboat Books in 2019 and was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry as well as a finalist for the Believer Book Award.
Ramya Ramana is an award-winning American author, poet, lyricist and writer. She was born, raised and currently resides in New York. Ramana won the NY Knicks Poetry Slam, which awarded her a full tuition scholarship to St. John’s University. Soon after, she became the Youth Poet Laureate of NYC. She has since performed at events such as the US Open, Tribeca Film Festival, TV One’s “Verses and Flow,” Pharrell’s Adidas Campaign, SONY TV’s Asian Women in the Arts Awards, the Immigrant Gala, Apollo Theatre Slam Finals, Celebrate Bklyn!, the Source Magazine Festival and many more. Her work can be found on the Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets websites and in Seventh Wave and the Southampton Review. Ramana published her first collection of poems through Penmanship Books, which was released at Lincoln Center. In addition to performing and writing, Ramana has also worked as an educator and mentor for young poets and young women. She recently received her MFA in creative writing from the New School. Ramana’s current endeavors include running a blog through Medium and working as a librettist for an operetta film. Her hope is to remain a student of wonder and to explore truth sincerely through her work and her life.
Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of Trébuchet (University of Georgia Press, 2016), a 2015 National Poetry Series selection, American Barricade (Yes Yes Books, 2014) and Family Album (Poor Claudia, 2014), as well as an EP of recorded poems, Trench Mouth, (Black Cake Records, 2014). The recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, his recent work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, Boston Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. He hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn and edits the PEN Poetry Series.
Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2018, the New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem.
Emily Sernaker is a writer and human-rights professional based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the Sun, New York Times, Ms. Magazine, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Rumpus, New Ohio Review and more. Over the last few years she has teamed up with Brooklyn Public Library to organize free, intergenerational, human-rights poetry programming, including Holding Space for Grief events, an Interfaith Poetry Reading, and Global Citizen poetry classes. She has worked as a staff member at the International Rescue Committee and New York Peace Institute and is currently an adjunct professor at the New School.
Jeff Simpson is the author of Vertical Hold (Steel Toe Books, 2011), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and The Morrill Hall Sessions, a free audio chapbook. In 2010, he founded The Fiddleback, an online journal of literature and art. His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore and Copper Nickel, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Oklahoma State University, where he was twice awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. He has taught creative writing and literature at Oklahoma State University, Old Westbury–SUNY and Queens College–CUNY. He is the multimedia producer for the Academy of American Poets and lives in South Slope.
Emily Skillings is the author of Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut,” as well as two chapbooks: Backchannel (Poor Claudia) and Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants (No, Dear/ Small Anchor Press). Recent poems can be found or are forthcoming in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Hyperallergic, LitHub and Jubilat. The recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize, Skillings is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a creative writing teaching fellow, and has taught creative writing elsewhere at Yale University, Parsons School of Design and Poets House.
imogen xtian smith is a poet and performer living in Lenapehoking / Brooklyn, NY. Their work has appeared in Baest, b l u s h, Folder, the Rumpus, the Poetry Project Newsletter and Tagvverk among other places, as well as in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. imogen holds an MFA from NYU and was a 2021–22 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellow at the Poetry Project. Their debut collection, stemmy things, is out from Nightboat Books.
Sampson Starkweather is the author of PAIN: The Board Game (Third Man Books, 2015) and The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather. He is a founding editor of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press. He is also the author of nine chapbooks, most recently Until the Joy of Death Hits, pop/love audio-visual GIF poems from Spork Press; Flux Capacitor, a collaborative audio poetry album from Black Cake Records; and Flowers of Rad, published by Factory Hollow Press. He lives in Ditmas Park.
Leigh Stein is a writer interested in what the internet is doing to our identities, relationships and politics. Her critically acclaimed satirical novel Self Care was released in June 2020. She’s also the author of The Fallback Plan, a novel; Dispatch from the Future, a collection of poetry; and Land of Enchantment, a memoir. From 2014 to 2017, she ran a secret Facebook group of 40,000 women writers, in her role as cofounder and executive director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist nonprofit organization. She’s been called a “leading feminist” by the Washington Post and “poet laureate of the Bachelor” by the Cut. Her fifth book, What to Miss When, a collection of poetry written during the Coronavirus pandemic, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in August 2021.
Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014) and several poetry and poetry comic chapbooks, including Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Press, 2016), I Saw The Devil With His Needlework (Argos Books, 2012), and I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You, Beautiful Mutant (Factory Hollow Press, 2012). She is also the illustrator of Antigonick, a collaboration with Anne Carson. She is the editor of Monk Books, a small press that publishes limited-edition chapbooks of poetry and art, and the chair of the Ruth Stone Foundation, an organization honoring the work of her grandmother, poet Ruth Stone.
Paige Taggart is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Or Replica (Brooklyn Arts Press, Dec 2014) and Want for Lion (Trembling Pillow Press, March 2014), and five chapbooks, most recently I Am Writing To You from Another Country: Translations of Henri Michaux (Greying Ghost Press). She graduated with a BA in Visual Studies from California College of the Arts and went on to complete an MFA in Creative Writing at the New School. She was a 2009 NYFA fellow and is the founder of Mactaggart Jewelry.
Cindy Tran is the author of the poetry collection Sonnet Crown for NYC (2021), winner of the Thornwillow Patrons’ Prize. A recipient of fellowships from NYSCA/NYFA, the Poetry Project, and the Loft Literary Center, Cindy has presented her work at the Shed, the Lincoln Center and the BBC. Cindy’s poems have been published in Slice, the Margins, Copper Nickel and elsewhere.
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of several books, including Marys of the Sea (ELJ Editions, 2016), #Survivor (The Operating System, 2020), and Killer Bob: A Love Story (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017) and received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is the founder of Yes, Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna.
R.A. Villanueva’s debut collection of poetry, Reliquaria, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). New work appears in Poetry, Guernica, American Poetry Review and widely elsewhere. His honors include a commendation from the 2016 Forward Prizes, an inaugural Ninth Letter Literary Award and fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Asian American Literary Review. He holds graduate degrees from Rutgers University and New York University and has taught writing at high schools and universities and for arts organizations in the United States and abroad. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he lives in Brooklyn.
Marina Weiss (MFA, PhD) is a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Innovation in Mental Health at the School of Public Health at the City University of New York. In her training as a therapist, Marina has specialized in integrative modalities to support recovery from trauma and post-traumatic growth, and she has trained in both inpatient and outpatient settings. Marina also holds an MFA in poetry from NYU and is the author of a chapbook, Misprison, which was selected by Aracelis Girmay for the Get Like Us prize from Rabbit Catastrophe Press in 2017. The title poem from the collection was also selected by Eileen Myles for the 2018 So to Speak poetry prize. Marina’s work has been published in Tin House, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.
Candace Williams is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. Their debut collection, I Am the Most Dangerous Thing, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Candace earned their BA in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) from Claremont McKenna College and an MA in education from Stanford University. They grew up in the Pacific Northwest and found poetry in Brooklyn, New York. Now, Candace lives and makes art in New England.
Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and several chapbooks. Selected by D.A. Powell for the 2011 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, her recent work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Hyperallergic, The Volta and elsewhere. She was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2014. She lives in Bushwick and teaches writing at CUNY.
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied and taught in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program. He earned an MFA from New York University and was recently a 2016–18 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Zamora has been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell Artist Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation and Yaddo. The recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes and Noble Writer for Writers Award, Zamora’s poems appear in Granta, the Kenyon Review, Poetry, the New York Times and elsewhere. Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon, 2017) is his first poetry collection.
Bill Zavatsky is the author of Where X Marks the Spot, For Steve Royal and Other Poems and Theories of Rain and Other Poems. With Zack Rogow, he co-translated Earthlight: Poems by André Breton, which won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize; with Ron Padgett he co-translated The Poems of A.O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud. For many years he served as the director of SUN, a literary press, as well as SUN magazine, and taught in the high school at the Trinity School in Manhattan. He has also taught workshops for Teachers & Writers Collaborative, the Poetry Project and Poets House, among other places. He currently teaches a walk-in poetry workshop at the Morningside Heights Library on the Upper West Side.
Jenny Zhang is the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012). Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Fence, Pen American, Jezebel, The Guardian and Vice, among other venues. She’s a regular contributor to Rookie and was a 2012-2013 Workspace writer-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She holds degrees from Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and a Provost Fellowship, and has taught fiction, nonfiction and poetry at Iowa, the New School and Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She currently teaches high school students in the Bronx and lives in Williamsburg.