George Abraham is a Palestinian-American Poet and Engineering PhD Candidate at Harvard University. He is the author of Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) and two chapbooks: al youm (the Atlas Review, 2017), and the specimen’s apology (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). He is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, the Watering Hole, and Brooklyn Poets, as well as the honor of "Best Poet" at the 2017 College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Rattle, Nashville Review, the Rumpus, Washington Square Review, Puerto del Sol, and anthologies such as Bettering American Poetry, Nepantla, and the Ghassan Kanafani Palestinian Literature Anthology. He is currently an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal ,Hunger Mountain, The Adroit Journal, The Southeast Review, North American Review, Salamander, Poetry Northwest, among others. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. She writes for The Kenyon Reviewblog. She is currently editing a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at 7TrainLove.org

Luther Hughes, born and raised Seattle, is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022) and the chapbook Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is a 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, founder of Shade Literary Arts, and Executive Editor for The Offing. His work has been published in Poetry, Paris Review, The Rumpus, New England Review, and others. He is the recipient of the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. Luther received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr. Raina J. León is an Afro-Latina writer and author of Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self (Alley Cat Books, 2019) as well as four other poetry books. She is a full professor of English Education at Saint Mary’s College of California, founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online journal of Latinx arts, and senior poetry editor for Raising Mothers, a literary journal for BIPOC parents.

torrin a. greathouse (she/they) is a transgender, cripple-punk, MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. They are the assistant editor of The Shallow Ends. Her work is published in POETRY, Ploughshares, & The Kenyon Review. They have received fellowships from the Effing Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She was a finalist for the 2020 Pushcart Prize & is the youngest ever winner of the Poetry Foundation's J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize. They are the author of two chapbooks, Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm (Damaged Goods, 2017) and boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018), and her debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in December 2020.

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, andTerrain.org. She is a contributor to 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.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, New-Generation African Poets Series) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of fellowships, scholarships, and awards from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, the Key West Literary Seminar, Dickinson House, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, where she is the 2017-2018 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT, and The Watering Hole, and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors and is a poetry editor for Freezeray Magazine. He is a cofounder of the Afrolatinx poetry collective Piel Cafe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nepantla, Rattle Poets Respond, Ninth Letter, Vinyl, Puerto del Sol, and African Voices, among others. He is a candidate for an MFA in Poetry at The University of Mississippi.

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and forthcoming spring 2017 from BOA Editions, Ltd. A Kundiman and Lambda Literary Fellow, Chen’s work has appeared in two chapbooks as well as in publications such as Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. Chen helps edit Iron Horse and Gabby. He also works on a new journal called Underblong, which he co-founded with the poet Sam Herschel Wein. Chen received his MFA from Syracuse University and is currently pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. He lives in Lubbock with his partner Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog Mr. Rupert Giles. For readings, workshops, and conversations about Tuxedo Mask, please send an email: chenchenwrites [at] gmail [dot] com.

Angel Nafis is 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 BuzzFeed Reader, them, Poetry Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets anthologies series, and elsewhere. Nafis is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Millay Colony, the Poetry Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon, she is also 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. Reading poems and facilitating workshops across the country she lives and works in Brooklyn.

Tanya Evanson is an Antiguan-Canadian poet, performer, producer and arts educator from Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She is also director of The Banff Centre Spoken Word Program, an arts residency for spoken word artists in the Rocky Mountains of Banff, Canada.

A graduate of Concordia University Creative Writing and English Literature, she has been performing spoken word internationally for 20 years. In 2013, she received The Golden Beret Award for her contribution to the spoken word genre and was Poet of Honour at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Notable performances include Vancouver Writers Festival, Bowery Poetry (New York), Story-Fest (Australia), Ubud Writers Festival (Indonesia), Word n Sound Festival (Johannesburg), Edinburgh Book Festival and Glastonbury Festival.

With four studio albums of spoken word and music under her belt, her latest project ZENSHIP (2016 Mother Tongue Media), has received critical acclaim for pushing the boundaries between oral poetry and music. Following six artist books, Bothism (2017 Ekstasis Editions)—an experimental Sufi text—is her first published poetry collection and Nouveau Griot (2018)—collected texts from her four albums—is fresh from Frontenac House. Other recent print publications include Arc Poetry Magazine, WSQ-Feminist Press, Making Room-40 Years of Room Magazine (Caitlin Press), and Resist Much/Obey Little (Dispatches Editions). She moonlights as a whirling dervish.

Paul Tran is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. Their work appears in MTV, Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, RHINO, which gave them a 2015 Editor's Prize, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, VONA, Poets House, Lambda Literary Foundation, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Home School Miami, Vermont Studio Center, and the Conversation, Paul is also the first Asian American in almost twenty years to represent the Nuyorican Poets Cafe at the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam, where they placed Top 10. Paul lives in Brooklyn, where they serve as Poet-In-Residence at Urban Word NYC and Poetry Editor at The Offing.

Christopher Soto (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016) and the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018). He cofounded the Undocupoets Campaign and worked with Amazon Literary Partnerships to establish grants for undocumented writers.  In 2017, he was awarded “The Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism” by Split This Rock and he was invited to teach a “Poetry and Protest Movements” course at Columbia University, as part of the June Jordan Teaching Corp. In 2016, Poets & Writers honored Christopher Soto with the “Barnes & Nobles Writer for Writers Award.” He frequently writes book reviews for the Lambda Literary Foundation. His poems, reviews, interviews, and articles can be found at The Nation, The Guardian, The Advocate, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and more. His work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Thai. He has been invited to speak at university campuses across the country. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript about police violence and mass incarceration. He received his MFA in poetry from NYU, where he was a Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshop Fellow.

Shira Erlichman is a visual artist, writer and musician. A three time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work can be found in The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed Reader, and PBS NewsHour’s Poetry Series, among others. She was awarded fellowships from the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and AIR Serenbe. She is the author of Odes to Lithium (Alice James Books, 2019) and her first picture book Be/Hold (Penny Candy Books, 2019). Israeli-born, raised in Massachusetts, she lives with her partner and big orange cat in Brooklyn. Be/hold is her first picture book. Learn more at www.officialshira.com 

Paige Lewis is the author of the chapbook Reasons to Wake You (Tupelo Press, 2018). Their poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Best New Poets 2017, and elsewhere.

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. His father fled El Salvador when he was a year old; and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents' migrations were caused by the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). 

In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually the Sonoran Desert. Before a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His book Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, Fall 2017), explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family. 

Zamora is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is a 2016 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O'Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. In 2016, Barnes and Noble granted him the Writers for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. 

He currently lives in San Rafael, CA. 

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

Emily O'Neill teaches writing and tends bar in Boston, MA. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican, is the inaugural winner of YesYes Books' Pamet River Prize for women and nonbinary writers as well as the winner of the 2016 Devil's Kitchen Reading Series. Her second collection, a falling knife has no handle, is forthcoming from YesYes in 2018. She is the author of four chapbooks and her recent work has appeared in Cutbank, Jellyfish, Redivider, Salt Hill, and Washington Square.

Eloisa Amezcua is an Arizona native. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. She is the author of three chapbooks and is the founder and editor of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry. You can find her at www.eloisaamezcua.com.

Khadijah Queen is the author of the poetry collections Conduit (Akashic Books 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011), Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015) and a verse play, Non-Sequitur, which won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers and was published by Litmus Press. The Relationship theater company also staged a full production in December 2015 at Theaterlab NYC. Her fifth book, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and published by YesYes Books in 2017. Individual poems and prose appear in Fence, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed, The Poetry Review (UK), Best American Nonrequired Reading, Fire & Ink: A Social Action Anthology and widely elsewhere. She teaches in the low residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University, and is a Visiting Scholar in Creative Writing at University of Colorado, Boulder. Visit her website: khadijahqueen.com.

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy (2014, YesYes Books), winner of the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Their second collection, Don't Call Us Dead, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. They are also the author of two chapbooks, hands on ya knees and black movie, winner of the Button Poetry Prize. Their work has published and featured widely, including in Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Buzzfeed, Blavity, & Ploughshares. They are a 2014 Ruth Lilly - Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a Cave Canem and VONA alum, and a recipient of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. Danez is a two-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, placing second in 2014. They edit for The Offing are a founding member of two collectives, Dark Noise and Sad Boy Supper Club. Danez lives in the midwest most of the time. 

Danez was featured in the American Academy of Poet's Emerging Writers Series by National Book Award Finalist Patricia Smith. Like her, Danez bridges the poetics of the stage to that of the page. Danez's work transcends arbitrary boundaries to present work that is gripping, dismantling of oppression constructs, and striking on the human heart. Often centered around intersections of race, class, sexuality, faith, and social justice, Danez uses rhythm, fierce raw power, and image to re-imagine the world as takes it apart in their work.

Mahogany L. Browne is a California-born, Brooklyn-based writer, educator, activist, mentor, and curator. The Cave Canem and Poets House alumnae is the author of several books, including Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution & About.com's Best Poetry Books of 2010. She has released five LPs, including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off-Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada, and recently Australia as 1/3 of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines such as Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada’s The Word, and UK’s MOBO. Her poetry has been published in the literary journals Pluck, Manhattanville Review, Muzzle, Union Station Mag, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Joint, and The Feminist Wire. In 2015, she released several poetry collections, including Smudge (Button Poetry), Redbone (Willow Books), and the anthology The Break Beat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket). She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices, and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. Brown is also the publisher of Penmanship Books, the Nuyorican Poets Café Poetry Program Director and Friday Night Slam curator, and currently an MFA Candidate for Writing and Activism at Pratt Institute.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, U.S.A. and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. In 2015, she published her debut poetry collection The Verging Cities (Center For Literary Publishing), which won the PEN American/Joyce Osterweil Award, the GLCA’s New Writers Award, the National Association of Chicana/o Studies Book Award, and the Utah Book Award. The Verging Cities was also featured in Poets and Writers, LitHub, and The Los Angeles Times. A CantoMundo fellow, her poems can be found in POETRY, Best American Poetry 2015, American Poets, The Believer, The Boston Review, and more. Learn more at nataliescenterszapico.com or follow her on twitter @nascenters.

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, educator, and writer.  Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets, and many others. Her work has been featured on new outlets like PBS, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011, she created Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first Spoken Word Poetry group, REFLEKS, while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook, After, came out on Yes Yes Books in fall 2015. She is the writer of Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Currently, she is an MFA candidate at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a spoken word poet and bookstore babe living in Boston. A gap-toothed bruja, Melissa believes in awkward silences, being loud, and saying no. Her poetry tries to capture the feeling her parents get when they meet someone from their home country and the feeling she gets when she’s late to a party. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion (2015) and a Brenda Mosey Video Slam Winner (2015).  She has previously been published in Electric Cereal, Jaded Ibis Press, Microchondria, and The Guardian.

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of the full-length collectionsLandscape with Headless Mama, which won the 2015 Pleiades Editors' Prize, and Protection Spell, winner of U. of Arkansas Press's 2016 Miller Williams Series Prize, and two poetry chapbooks, Curanderisma (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2016) and The Daughter's Curse (ELJ, forthcoming 2017). Her honors include an NEA Fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, The 2015 Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Net 2015, Best New Poets 2013, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and Southern Humanities Review (where she was a finalist for the 2015 Auburn Witness Prize). She is Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal and teaches online workshops at The Poetry Barn. 

Cynthia Cruz is the author of four collections of poetry, including three with Four Way Books: The Glimmering Room (2012), Wunderkammer (2014), and How the End Begins (2016). Cruz has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts. Cruz is currently pursuing a PhD in German Studies at Rutgers University and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of the poetry collection, Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Contact Cathy at cathylinhche [at] gmail [dot] com.

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear recently or soon in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. His debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, will be published by Alice James Books in Fall 2017; he is also the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. A recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.