Contributors

 

Shay Alexi (they/she) is a poet and performance artist based out of Atlanta, GA. They are the author of Diary of a Ghost Girl (Glass Poetry Press), and their work has appeared in The Rumpus, PANK, and Homology Lit, amongst others.

Sana Badri is an educator and portrait and documentary photographer from London. Her work focuses on marginalized communities and explores themes of belonging, home, and intimacy. The driving force behind her photography is a desire to pay tribute to the seemingly mundane moments of daily life, the small beauties that often go overlooked.

Gustavo Barahona-López is a poet and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. In his writing, Barahona-López draws from his experience growing up in a Mexican immigrant household. He sees writing as a space to process and come closer to understanding the self but also as a first step to building connection. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Glass’ Poets Resist, PALABRITAS, Puerto del Sol, The Acentos Review, Homology Lit, Dark Marrow, among other publications. When Barahona-López is not teaching you can find him re-discovering the world with his son.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in Electric Literature, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, American Short Fiction, and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018, she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Artist, writer, and curator Andre Bradley lives and works in Baltimore, MD, and Philadelphia, PA. Currently an MFA candidate and George Ciscle Scholar in Curatorial Practice at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Bradley is a graduate of Hampshire College (2012), where he was selected as a James Baldwin Scholar and was the recipient of the first annual Elaine Mayes Award for Photography. During his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA 2015), Bradley was named a president’s scholar and a recipient of the T.C. Colley Award for Photographic Excellence, which ultimately led to his work becoming part of the permanent collection at the RISD Museum of Art. His book Dark Archives was shortlisted for the photo-text book award at Les Rencontres de la Photographie and the Paris photo-aperture foundation first Photobook Award, both in 2016. He has been a fellow at ImageTextIthaca, the Creative Media Institute at Hampshire College, and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center.

Sasha Bonét is a writer, critic, and visual storyteller living in New York City. While employing various mediums for storytelling, her work explores the ways in which race, gender, and art influence cultural norms and the way we experience them. Sasha is currently at work on a collection of nonfiction narrative essays on Black womanhood in America. Her work has appeared in Vogue, The Village Voice, BOMB Magazine, Guernica, Topic, Document Journal, ELLE, and many other publications. @sasha.bonet. www.sashabonet.com.

Nik Buhler is a queer, Appalachian native living in Knoxville, TN. Their work has appeared in Crab Fat Magazine and Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine. When they’re not working on new poems and essays, Nik Buhler can be found at Firefly Farms annoying sheep into loving them back.

Marcus Clayton is an Afro-Latino writer who grew up in South Gate, CA, and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from CSU Long Beach. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, focusing his studies on the intersections between Latinx literature, Black literature, and Punk Rock. He is an executive editor for Indicia Literary Journal, and has previously taught English Composition at various LA community colleges. Some of his published work can be seen in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Adroit Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and DUM DUM Zine among many others.

Daniel Diasgranados is a photographer and artist originally from Prince George’s County, MD, and working out of Richmond, VA. His work uses documentary abstraction to question ideas of race, sexuality, identity, and power. He views photography as a document and a photographic form of mapmaking that allows for future expansions of language. Geographic history, music culture, popular culture, science fiction, and writing work together to build a language that is personal, poetic and empathetic to the experiences of being raised in the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia area) and the Blatino-American experience.

Zoë Eddy is a Huron-Wendat and Ojibwe scholar and writer. She is a trained anthropologist who uses her research to explore the complexities of contemporary Indigenous identity; she works both in the US and internationally and is committed to addressing issues of global Indigenous rights. She is heavily involved in activism for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. In addition to writing and researching, Zoë is a performer, animal lover, and visual artist.

Born to Vietnamese refugees, Michelle Phuong Ho is a poet and cultural worker based in New Haven, CT. Her writing has been nominated for the “Best American Essays” series and most recently appeared in Wildness, Tupelo Quarterly, and Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture Festival. A Tin House alum, Michelle has received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Omnidawn, Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She holds a BA in American studies from Yale University and currently serves as an organizer for The Racial Imaginary Institute and a 2020 Curatorial Fellow with NXTHVN.

Originally from Oxford, Ohio, Ava Hofmann is a trans writer currently living and working as an MFA student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Fence, Anomaly, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, The Fanzine, Datableed, Peachmag, Bomb Cyclone, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Her website is www.nothnx.com, and her Twitter handle is @st_somatic.

Cyree Jarelle Johnson is a writer and librarian from Piscataway, NJ. SLINGSHOT, his first book of poetry, is available now from Nightboat Books.

Myles Loftin recognizes the latent power that images hold and seeks to utilize that power as a means for creating positive change. He is a photographer, director, and a senior in the BFA Photo program at Parsons School of Design. With a practice that blends portraiture, fine art, and fashion photography, his photos exude a feeling of vibrance, freedom, and youth. Loftin’s work deals with themes of blackness, identity, and representation of marginalized individuals. His subjects are often times friends, family members, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. In 2016, Loftin released the photo and video project ‘HOODED,’ which humanizes and decriminalizes the societal perception of black men and boys. This work, and the others that followed, have led him to participate in various public speaking engagements worldwide, including talks at Yale University, SXSW, Dutch Design Week, and the Cannes Festival of Creativity. He has exhibited work in group shows with Aperture Foundation, Superposition Gallery, and other galleries across the U.S. Making art is an important part of Loftin’s life, and as an artist of color, he works to inspire other artists of color to pursue successful careers in the creative industry.

Zinzi Minott’s work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies, and politics. Strongly identifying as a dancer, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance and the place of black female bodies within the form. Her work explores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender, and class. Zinzi is interested in the space between dance and other art forms, and though her practice is driven through dance, the outcomes range from performance and live art to sound, film, dances, and object-based work.

Kwame Opoku-Duku is a Ghanaian-American poet and fiction writer. He is the author of The Unbnd Verses (Glass Poetry Press, 2018), and his work is featured in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Shallow Ends, The Literary Review, Bettering American Poetry, and other publications. Kwame lives in New York City, where he is an educator, and, along with Karisma Price, he is a founding member of the Unbnd Collective. Kwame is an associate poetry editor for BOAAT Journal, and he curates the reading series Dear Ocean.

Angela Peñaredondo is a queer Pilipinx interdisciplinary writer, artist, and educator. Peñaredondo is author of the chapbook Maroon (Jamii Publications) and All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize). Peñaredondo’s work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Black Warrior Review, Anomaly (aka Drunken Boat), Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Peñaredondo is a Kundiman fellow, VONA/Voices of Our Nations Art fellow, Macondista, as well as an assistant professor of creative writing and digital humanities at California State University San Bernardino.

Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. She was a 2018-2019 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and is an Assistant Poetry Editor for The Margins. Raees is from Lahore, Pakistan, is a graduate of Bennington College, and currently lives in New York City. Her website is: www.ayesharaees.com.

Thomas Renjilian is originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Joyland, DIAGRAM, The Journal, Thrush, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He received his BA from Vassar College and MFA from Oregon State University. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, where he is a Dornsife Fellow.

Ica Sadagat is a Filipinx poet and educator based in New York City. Their work considers water, root memory, queer erotics, bodily restitution, and the bounds and boundlessness of textual language, among others. Ica writes to generate and preserve flesh through her own world-making. For more: icasadagat.co.

ire’ne lara silva is the author of three poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, and CUICACALLI/House of Song, and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire’ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci, and a second collection of short stories, the light of your body. Website: irenelarasilva.wordpress.com

Mai Tran is a Vietnamese-American writer from California. Her work has appeared in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and The Financial Diet, and she is currently waitressing and living in Brooklyn. You can find her on Twitter or Instagram @maiittran.

Lisbeth White is a poet, expressive arts therapist and elemental healer. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Rumpus, Kweli, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, and elsewhere. In both her creative and healing work, she explores and celebrates the poignant and potent relationships between Black women of color and the natural world.