Joshua Aiken is a poet and black studies scholar. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and winner of the Martin Starkie Prize. His poetry can be found, or is forthcoming, in publications including Assaracus, BOAAT, Copper Nickel, Green Mountains Review, Sixth Finch, The Indianapolis Review, Muzzle, and Pleiades Magazine. Joshua holds graduate degrees in History and Forced Migration Studies, and is a former Policy Fellow at the Prison Policy Initiative. He is currently a JD/PhD Candidate in History and AfricanAmerican Studies at Yale University, where his research focuses on race, guns, violence, and the rule of law in American social life.

Nicola Andrews (she/they) is a member of the Ngāti Pāoa iwi, currently living on Ramaytush Ohlone territory. An alum of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Rooted & Written writing workshops, their work can be found in publications including NAILED, takahē, and Cordite Poetry Review. They tweet as @maraebrarian, and still play Pokémon GO.

Asnia Asim’s debut chapbook Quarantine with Rilke (Finishing Line Press, 2021) was listed by Ms. Magazine as one of “the most exciting and necessary collections published late last year and forthcoming in 2022.” Her poems have received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her latest work can be found in The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, CALYX,  Typehouse, and Cream City Review, among others. She is the recipient of the University of Chicago’s Humanities Fellowship and Brandeis University’s Alan Slifka Award.

Kyle Seamus Brosnihan is a Filipino-American poet and playwright. Raised in Nebraska, he now lives in New York. He received his MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College in 2022. His poetry has been published in Hobart, Peach Magazine, The Mantle, Interpret Magazine, and elsewhere.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. (b. 1993 in Baldwin, NY) is an artist, photographer, and educator currently based in Queens, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2022, 2019); Staple Goods, New Orleans (2019); and Baxter St. at the Camera Club of New York (2019). Recent group exhibitions include The James Gallery, New York (2022); Swiss Institute, New York (2021); RISD Museum of Art, Providence (2021); The Arts Club of Chicago (2020); New Orleans Museum of Art(2020); Public Art Fund, New York (2020); The MAC, Belfast (2019); PPOW, New York (2019); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2018); Yossi Milo Gallery, New York (2018); Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2018); We Buy Gold, New York (2018), among others. He is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York. He is a part-time lecturer in the Department of Photography at Parsons School of Design.

Justin Chance (b. 1993 in New York, NY) is an artist and writer based in New York. Chance received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a BA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Chance’s work has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at the following venues: Apparatus Projects, Chicago (2022); Downs and Ross at CFA Live, Milan (2022); Tuesday, Richmond, VA (2021); Gern en Regalia, New York (2021); and Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2021, 2018). The artist’s work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions at venues including: JTT, Chapter, Arsenal Contemporary, Downs & Ross, all New York, Galerie Anton Janizewski, Berlin DE; Thierry Goldberg,  Housing, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Baltimore.

Noah Arhm Choi is the author of Cut to Bloom, the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Prize. They received a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and their work appears in Barrow Street, Blackbird, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, The Rumpus, Split This Rock and others. Noah was shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize and received the 2021 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and Assistant Director of DEI at a school in New York City. For more information, visit noaharhmchoi.com or @noah.arhm.choi on Instagram.

Shawanda Corbett’s (b. 1989 in New York) studio practice background is in ceramics (vessel making). The craft principles, fundamentals and discipline in ceramics are applied to other mediums, such as dance theater production (live performance and film performance). This technique is called craft theory. Currently, she is researching how artificial intelligence could facilitate craft theory in her studio practice. Corbett is pursuing her practice-led doctoral degree in Fine Art at the University of Oxford. Her research redefines Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, or the cybernetic organism, as anything mechanical that enhances an individual’s life. The research also focuses on the relationship between human beings and technology created with artificial intelligence. This is approached through science fiction genre in film and literature but from a perspective of a differently-abled body (cyborg) woman of color, so this includes texts, film (visual representation), music in African American history/African history, and artificial intelligence history. 

Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/Z/they) is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, is featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore, and is gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. She lives in Ames, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University and community farm volunteer. You can learn more at www.zoefaystindt.com.

Angalis Field (he/him) is a writer-director and photographer living in New York City. He is currently an MFA thesis student in the graduate film program at NYU Tisch (’23). He graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University (’16) with a BA in English. His work embodies a new queer subjectivity in photography and film, combining intimacy and formalism to picture contemporary transness while questioning its cultural production.

Alejandro Heredia is a queer Afro Dominican writer and community organizer from The Bronx. He has received fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA, the Dreamyard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, and the Dominican Studies Institute. In 2019, he was selected by Myriam Gurba as the winner of the Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Contest. His book of short stories, You’re the Only Friend I Need (2021), explores themes of queer transnationalism, friendship, and (un)belonging in the African Diaspora. Alejandro’s work has been featured in Teen Vogue, Lambda Literary Review, Tasteful Rude Magazine, and elsewhere.

Iqra Khan is a bilingual poet, activist, and lawyer. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, Palette Poetry, Baltimore Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and The Bombay Review. Her work is centered around the experiences of the brown body, particularly the Muslim body, collective nostalgia, and the aspirations of her endangered community.

Originally from New Jersey, Aundeah J. Kearney now lives and works in New Orleans. She holds degrees in English from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. 

Abigail Lucien (b. 1992) is a Haitian-American sculptor whose works belong to a third-culture terrain, a transnational landscape where contradictions are embraced and code meshing is the norm. From material to color to language, Lucien’s practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, (im)migration, and place by exploring inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Lucien was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, is a recipient of a 2021 VMFA Fellowship, and the 2020 Harpo Emerging Artist Fellow. Past exhibitions include SculptureCenter (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), MAC Panamá (Panamá), Deli Gallery (New York), Canada (New York), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta), UICA (Grand Rapids, MI), and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia). Residencies include Amant Studio & Research Residency (New York), the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts (Wrocław, Poland), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), ACRE (Steuben, WI), and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency (Saugatuck, MI). Lucien is currently based in Baltimore, where they teach sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. 

Gerardo Pacheco Matus is a Mayan Native. Pacheco was awarded the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and has also received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, The Frost Place, and Macondo. Pacheco’s poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared and are forthcoming from the Grantmakers in the Arts, Apricity Press, The Amistad (Howard University), Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, The Packinghouse Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, West Branch Wired, Four Way Review, The Cortland Review, Nashville Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, Memorious Magazine, Tin House Magazine, Play on Words, Anomaly Press, Peripheries Journal, Noyo Review, among others. Pacheco is currently a tenured professor at Cañada College. 

Teresa Milbrodt has published three short story collections: Instances of Head-Switching, Bearded Women: Stories, and Work Opportunities. Milbrodt has also published a novel, The Patron Saint of Unattractive People, and a flash fiction collection, Larissa Takes Flight: Stories. She is addicted to coffee, long walks with her MP3 player, and writes the occasional haiku. Read more of her work at http://teresamilbrodt.com

Phoebe Oathout is a trans writer living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Her fiction has been supported by a 2022 American Short Fiction Workshop Fellowship and is forthcoming from The Southeast Review, where she was recently nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize in debut fiction. Before moving to Baltimore, she lived in Laramie, Wyoming, where she worked in student financial aid.

Alixen Pham is a Best New Poets 2022 finalist and Best of the Net-nominated poet/writer/artist with various publications including The Slowdown featuring Ada Limón, Salamander, Rust & Moth, New York Quarterly, Brooklyn Poets and DiaCRITICS. She leads the Westside Los Angeles chapter of Women Who Submit, a nonprofit organization nurturing and supporting women and nonbinary writers. Alixen is the recipient of The City of West Hollywood Artist Grant, the Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, AWP Mentee Program, PEN Center Fiction Scholarship and others. Her Twitter / Instagram is @AlixenPham.

Naieka Raj (she/her) is a third-culture gremlin living in Brooklyn, NY. 

Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer and editor from the Great Lakes currently living in the Gulf Coast. She is a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow and 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared in various media and publications, including the Sundance Film Festival, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Annulet, Montez Press Radio and more. Her debut poetry collection, Dereliction, is currently available via The Song Cave.

Ashley Teamer’s collages explore the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time. She uses painting, sculpture, photography, and sound to creatively intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture, revealing the malleability of our built environment. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014) and the Joan Mitchell Center (2018). Teamer received a BFA from Boston University in 2013 and an MFA from Yale University in 2022. Her work has been most recently exhibited as a series of billboards called “Lady Bleu Devils” in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Ali A. Ünal is a writer and translator from Turkey. He studied creative writing at UMass, Amherst, where he won the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Fiction Award. His story “A Man in New York Remembering” was on Wigleaf’s 2021 Top 50 Short Fiction longlist; Ünal was also a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Quarterly West, Necessary Fiction, Jersey Devil Press, and other journals in his native Turkey. He co-wrote and co-directed a short movie, Except for the Kings, which won the Best Short Film Award at the 17th International Ankara Film Festival and was screened in several festivals across Europe. He earned his PhD in English with a creative writing focus from University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Currently, he’s teaching creative writing at Central Washington University.

Sydney Elexis Vernon (b. 1995 in Maryland) lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. While studying drawing, painting, photography, and printmaking at Cooper Union, she learned to combine charcoal, dry pastels, graphite, and ink in her works on paper. Many of her works take a multimedia approach and can be considered monotypes. Vernon’s process also includes committing long intervals of time to dedicated journaling, graphing, reading, sketching, and writing. In an ongoing work, using her own family as a direct source, the recognizable faces of her childhood are disrupted. The mark-making is in response to deep meditations on family and assimilation. A sense of safety and belonging is made possible by the popularization of point and shoot camera technology. The poses and postures of the photographic images are then reimagined, consequently changing how people once frozen in time by image technology are now immortalized by art historial ontologies. A desire to critique consumer culture and identity-based art guides Vernon to work alongside and outside of this family memory project. In contrast to the safety of familiar faces, she leans toward imagined narratives and the chaos of popular culture. All of her works exist in the same temporal constellation, binded by her sensitivity to being observed and the legible style of mark-making.