Elinam Agbo was born in Ghana and grew up in Kansas. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Bare Life Review, Nimrod, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the Clarion Workshop, she is currently the Kenyon Review Fellow in Prose.

Ashia Ajani is a Black storyteller and educator hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains, unceded territory of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe peoples. Their work explores Black diasporic environmental stewardship, harm & placemaking. Ajani’s words have been featured in Sierra Magazine, World Literature Today, Them, and Atmos Magazine. Their poetry debut, Heirloom, is forthcoming Spring 2023 with Write Bloody Publishing. Ajani is a 2022 Just Buffalo Literary Center Poetry Fellow & co-editor of The Hopper Literary Magazine. They can be found grass-side, sharing a cup of coffee with the sun. Check out more of Ajani’s writings on social media @ashiainbloom and ashiaajani.com. 

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook Bone House was published by Bull City Press. Her short story collection, Gods of Want, is forthcoming from One World, as well as a novel titled Organ Meats.

Sydney Jin Choi is from the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark. You can find her at sydneyjinchoi.com.

Allana Clarke (b. 1987) is a Trinidadian-American artist whose practice is built upon a foundation of uncertainty, curiosity, a will to heal, and an insistence upon freedom. Fluidly moving through photography, sculptural and text-based works, video and performance, her research-based practice incorporates socio-political and art historical texts, to contend with ideas of Blackness, the binding nature of bodily signification, and of the possibility to create non-totalizing identifying structures. Clarke received her BFA in photography from New Jersey City University in 2011 and an MFA in interdisciplinary practice from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2014. She is an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Clarke has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and Yaddo. She has received several grants including the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund, and a Puffin Foundation Grant. Her work has been screened and performed at Gibney Dance in NY, Invisible Export NY, New School Glassbox Studio NY, FRAC in Nantes, France, SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, and was featured in the Bauhaus Centennial edition Bauhaus Now: Is Modernity an Attitude. She recently completed a 2020-21 NXTHVN fellowship, a mentorship program co-founded by artist Titus Kaphar. Clarke is represented by Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne and Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago.

Dmitri Derodel is a poet, songwriter, essayist, and Scholastic Gold Medalist. He’s been published by—among others—The Best Teen Writing of 2020, Navigating the Maze 2020, Rising Phoenix Press, and the Dutch magazine OneWorld.

mai c. doan is a mixed femme poet and writer from Southern California. She has published and performed her work though the National Queer Arts Festival, Entropy Magazine, the Poetry Project, and more. She holds an MFA from Mills College, where she attended as a Community Engagement Fellow. water/tongue (Omnidawn, 2019), her first book of poetry, was a 2020 Lambda Literary Award nominee. She lives in Albuquerque, NM with her dog, Story. Find her on the internet at maicdoan.com

Johanna Dong is a NYC-based writer originally from Southern California. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications such as The Rumpus, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Margins, and Atticus Review. 

Golden (they/them) is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer, poet, & community organizer raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land), currently residing in Boston, MA (Massachusett people land). They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (Game Over Books, 2022) and the photographic self-portraiture series On Learning How to Live, documenting black trans life at the intersections of surviving & living in the United States. Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), a Best of the Net Award (2020), a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence (2020-2021), a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship in Photography (2021), & a Women Photograph Project Grant (2021). Their published & collaborative work can be found on Instagram (@goldenthem_) or through their website goldengoldengolden.com

Day Heisinger-Nixon is a nonbinary & disabled poet, essayist, interpreter, and translator. Raised in an ASL-English bilingual home in Fresno, California, Day holds an MA in Deaf Studies from Gallaudet University and is a current MFA candidate in Creative Writing at New England College. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Foglifter, Booth, and elsewhere. They are currently based in London.

Joe Hughes III is a writer and poet from Woodbridge, Virginia who studies undergraduate creative writing and Africana studies at Virginia Tech. His work explores alternative Black experiences, masculinity, and empathy, and has appeared in Dudefluencer.com, Level Ground’s Skew Magazine, and Virginia Tech’s undergraduate research magazine, Philologia. Joe’s poetry was nominated for an undergraduate creative writing award in 2021, and he was a top ten finalist for the 2022 Giovanni-Steger Poetry Award. You can learn more about Joe at his website, or on Instagram and Twitter.

Tommy Kha (b. 1988, Memphis, Tennessee) received his photography MFA from Yale University. He is the recipient of the Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo Fund, a Jerome Hill Fellowship, the Hyères Photography Grand Prix finalist, and is a former resident at Light Work, the Camera Club of New York, and the International Studios and Curatorial Program. He was named one of 47 artists in the inaugural Silver List. His work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foam, Creative Review, Dazed, Interview, McSweeney’s, Hyperallergic, Butt Magazine, Buzzfeed, Miranda July’s “We Think Alone,” and Vice. He has collaborated with the Billboard Creative in Los Angeles, and exhibited at Nathalie Karg Gallery (NYC), Launch F18 (NYC), LMAKgallery (NYC), PS122 Gallery (NYC), Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), Teen Party (NYC), Brooks Museum (Memphis), Blue Sky (Portland), Ogden Museum of Southern Art (LA), Yongkang Lu Art (Shanghai), Hyères Festival (France), and Unseen Festival (Amsterdam). He held his first solo show at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, which was followed by his New York solo debut at the Camera Club of New York in May 2019. He appeared in Laurie Simmons’ narrative feature, My Art. He currently teaches photography at the New School and at Yale University. He joined Higher Pictures Generation in 2022. His first major publication will be published by Aperture in February 2023. He lives and works between New York City and Memphis.

Malcolm Peacock earned a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond in 2016 and an MFA from The Mason Gross School of Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey, in 2019. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines emotional and psychic spaces of Black subjects. Peacock is particularly interested in the intricacies of intimacy. He has been a participant in residencies at The University of Pennsylvania, St. Roch Community Church, The Joan Mitchell Center, Denniston Hill, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited at Cindy Rucker Gallery in New York, Terrault Gallery in Baltimore, The Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, The Prospect Triennial in New Orleans, Louisiana and has forthcoming exhibitions at SE Cooper Gallery and the Carnegie Museum of Art. 

Xavier John Richardson is a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellow, and a Callaloo Fellow. Xavier’s fiction or nonfiction appears in Harpur Palate, Rigorous, Apiary, Track Four, and others.   

Sreshtha Sen is a poet from Delhi and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review, an online journal for & by south Asian poets. They studied Literatures in English from Delhi University and completed their MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Their work can be found published or forthcoming in Apogee, bitch media, BOAAT, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, The Margins, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She was the 2017-18 readings/workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currently teaches in Las Vegas where she’s finishing her PhD in poetry and is the assistant poetry editor at The Believer.

SA Smythe is a transdisciplinary writer, artist, and assistant professor of black studies and its archives. They engage poetry, sound installation, performance, and black feminist, trans, and other political theory to pursue black possibility and amplify black belonging beyond all borders. Smythe has performed and/or lectured internationally, most recently at Kampnagel (Germany), Scuderie del Quirinale (Rome), GXRLSCHOOL (Los Angeles), and Africa Writes Festival (London). Their public and poetic work has been featured in The Feminist Wire, okayafrica, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, contemp(t)orary, Johannesburg Salon, Critical Contemporary, Apogee and elsewhere, including several anthologies and edited volumes. Recipient of the 2022 Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies, they are currently based between Rome, Italy and Tongva Land (Los Angeles).

Dujie Tahat is the author of three chapbooks: Here I Am O My God, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship; Salat, winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award and longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection; and Balikbayan, finalist for The New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest and a Center for Book Arts honoree. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, they cohost The Poet Salon podcast. Dujie serves as Critic-at-Large for Poetry Northwest and poetry editor for Moss. 

Diana Veiga is a Spelman woman, a DC resident, and a DC Public Library employee. Her short stories have been published in Barrelhouse, The Northern Virginia Review, and The Rumpus. She is an inaugural member of Kimbilio, a Fellowship dedicated to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora. She was the 2021 One Story Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow.

Spencer Williams is from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review, 2017) and has work featured in PANK, Muzzle, Foglifter, and Hobart. She received her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University–Newark and is currently a PhD student in poetics at the University at Buffalo.