iman adam is a Mombasa-born queer and trans writer. They are currently pursuing an MFA at Rutgers-Newark, where they write about the ocean, exile, and (great-)grandmothers.

Ezza Ahmed is an educator and poet based in NYC. Her poetry is concerned with diaspora, memory, and water (rivers, creeks, lakes, etc.). When she isn’t writing, she enjoys cozying up with a good cup of tea. Her work is in Wande Magazine, The Idaho Review, The Gingerbug Press and is forthcoming in the Sycamore Review.

Tina Zafreen Alam is a diasporic Bangladeshi poet who does not believe in space, time, or borders. She is calling on you to commit your heart, body, and soul to fighting for the liberation of Palestine and of all oppressed people around the globe. We owe it to ourselves, and to one another. Revolution until complete liberation for all of us, all together.

Ola Alrantisi is a 29-year-old human rights researcher and activist based in Norway, with deep roots in a Palestinian village, Yebna, and a strong connection to her family in Gaza. Her work has been published in Norwegian magazines like VOKS and the Samora Forum. Ola is also the founder of @bateekh.pal, an online store supporting Palestinian families in Gaza, uniting pro-Palestinian supporters through economic empowerment. Her work and poetry reflect a profound commitment to justice and the Palestinian cause, echoing the resilience and aspirations of Gaza’s people.

G’Ra Asim, a writer and musician, is an assistant professor of creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother and frontperson for DIY punk act Baby Got Back Talk.

Estella Burque (Sweet Rabbit) is a lesbian Mvskoke Creek writer currently living in Portland, completing a degree in creative writing at Reed College, and the winner of the 2024 Mary Barnard Poetry Award.

Kiah Celeste (b.1994, Brooklyn, NY) is a multi-dimensional artist whose work has transcended fitting into one category or medium. Living a peripatetic life since leaving her native Brooklyn, Celeste moved from her university background in photography into three-dimensional production. Kiah has spent her time completing artist residencies in Barcelona, Vienna, and Frankfort (KY), as well as solo exhibitions in Chicago, Lisbon, New York and Louisville. Her work has recently been acquired by the Speed Art Museum, KMAC Museum, and University of Kentucky Art Museum. Constantly gleaning objects from urban and industrial environments, Kiah Celeste forages for materials that speak to her. Using almost exclusively discarded or secondhand items, she creates something new and fortuitous from decay. Although these works are often made with synthetic materials, they allude to the organic and the surreal. By adhering to rigorous principles of sustainability and low intervention, she challenges physics, with compositions that carefully balance through tension, weight, flexibility, and gravity. These texturally rich compositions highlight the inherent beauty of the objects, while retiring their original function. With a multifarious identity as a Black and Jewish woman, both feminine and androgynous, and introverted and social, among other contrasting in betweens, her sense of un-belonging finds respite in the embrace of disparate materials, creating a cohesive whole, finding freedom in self, the world, and creative practice. Kiah Celeste currently lives and works in Louisville, KY. She is jointly represented by DOCUMENT and Swivel Gallery.

Jonathan Lyndon Chase is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, video, sound, and sculpture to depict queer Black love and community. Rendered through layers of bright, visceral paint, make-up, and glitter, Chase’s figures are suspended in various forms of articulation amidst the backdrop of urban and domestic spaces. These dynamic compositions blend emotional and physical, internal and external states of being to challenge and subvert canonical misrepresentations and exclusion of the Black body. Chase’s recently featured solo and two-person institutional exhibitions include “his beard is soft, my hands are empty”, Artists Space, New York (2023); “Big Wash”, the Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia (2020-2021); “Jonathan Lyndon Chase, the Pond Society”, Shanghai (2019); and “Semblance: The Public/Private/Shared Self”, LSU Museum of Art in New Orleans (2019). Recent group shows include those at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; the Rudolph Tegner Museum, Dronningmølle; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; LACMA, Los Angeles; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; RISD Museum of Art, Providence; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; the Rubell Museum, Miami and Washington, D.C.; and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Their work is included in numerous private and public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, ICA Miami, High Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bronx Museum, Rubell Museum, Buxton Contemporary Art Museum, The Wedge Collection, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Leslie Lohman Museum, Fairfield University Museum, and Woodmere Museum of Art. Jonathan Lyndon Chase published “wild wild Wild West & Haunting of the Seahorse” (2020), an experimental narrative blending horror and science fiction, with Capricious Foundation. Chase was born in 1989 in Philadelphia where they currently live and work.

Founded in 2022, Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 is a Chinese queer feminist art and organizing collective working with performance, text, installation, photography, and video. Our community collective poetry and translations have been published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Feminist Center for Creative Work, Massachusetts Review, and forthcoming at Scholar and Feminist Online.

Vincent Chong (莊志明) is a Queer mixed-race Chinese-American artist working in Chinese calligraphy, seal carving, painting, drawing, and performance. They paint portraits of members of their QTAPI and QTBIPOC community and create performances combining high camp drag/gogo/gymnastics aesthetics with live, large-scale calligraphy demonstration. They have shown work at Armature Projects, Lehman College, La MaMa, SoMad, Skånes Konstförening, Center for Book arts, Bodeguita 718, The Museum of Chinese in America, Site Brooklyn, and PAAM. They have performed at Columbus Park, Center for Performance Research, QNA, Inter Arts Center, Skånes Konstförening, MoMA PS1, Abrons Art Center, Movement Research, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Center for Book Arts. Residencies include ISCP, Gallim, the WOW Project Storefront Residency, Center for Book Arts Book Artist Residency, and Fire Island Artist Residency. Awards include NYFA/NYSCA fellowship, City Artist Corp Grant, and Huayu Enrichment Scholarship. 

Christina Cooke’s debut novel Broughtupsy was published in January 2024 and has been named a “must-read” title by more than 20 publications across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and the Caribbean—including The Atlantic, ELLE, Cosmopolitan UK, CBC Books, Electric Literature, LitHub, and more. A MacDowell Fellow and Journey Prize winner, she holds a Master of Arts from the University of New Brunswick and a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, PRISM International, Prairie Schooner, and Epiphany among others, and is forthcoming in fall 2024 from Michigan Quarterly Review. Born in Jamaica, Christina is now a Canadian citizen who lives and writes in New York City.

River 瑩瑩 Dandelion (he, him, keoi 佢) walks with his ancestors. He is a practitioner of ancestral medicine through writing, teaching, energy healing, and creating ceremony. As a poet, he writes to connect with the unseen and unspoken so we can feel and heal. Winner of the 2024 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers, River is the author of remembering (y)our light, a debut chapbook on honoring matriarchs and ancestors across generations. A Tin House resident, Lambda Literary fellow, and Kundiman fellow, River facilitates creative writing workshops, where participants connect with their own inner and collective power. He has taught at Rutgers University-Newark, Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, Restorative Justice Initiative, Lambda Literary, Museum of the City of New York, and elsewhere. Thrice-nominated for Best of the Net, River’s work is published or forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Bellevue Literary Review, The Margins, Mizna, The Offing, Asian American Journal of Psychology, and anthologized elsewhere. He loves to swim and does this work for queer and trans ancestors and descendants to come. For more, visit riverdandelion.com.

Jordany Genao is a Dominican interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Queens, NY (Lenapehoking). In their practice they emphasize visual and theoretical connections between Arawak-taino cosmology and ceramics, Caribbean plants, and queerness. The space that nature occupies in their work is an affirmation of the ways it is culturally engaged to co-create homes, medicine, and alternative realities. Their work celebrates the practice of being closer to nature and using its wisdom to spotlight the multifaceted relationships between land, history, and culture. Since receiving their BFA from SVA in 2014, their work has been featured in group shows at Flux Factory (Queens, NY), and Turley Gallery (Hudson, NY), among others.

Anthony Gomez III is an instructor at the University of Oklahoma and is currently based between Brooklyn and Oklahoma. He is a Chicano writer with pieces appearing in New Letters, Four Way Review, Shenandoah, and other literary magazines. Read more at www.anthonygomeziii.com.

Najee H.F. (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. They are a current MFA candidate at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a descendant of enslaved africans and her current work is centered around (re)connecting to those ancestors through actions that they would have likely done with their hands. Her practice currently includes performance, fiber based sculpture using basket weaving techniques and hair braiding and growing, and processing and dyeing with indigo.

Tomiekia Johnson is an activist, writer, prison journalist, poet, musical artist, curator, facilitator, inside organizer, public speaker, and “prison lawyer.” Born and raised in Compton, Tomiekia earned a bachelor’s degree in public administration on a basketball scholarship and worked in law enforcement as a clerk, police officer, and 911 operator/dispatcher for 14 years. A survivor of extreme domestic violence, she currently has over 22,800 signatures on a Change.org petition for a governor’s commutation.

Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai’i and the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2026). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Arah was nominated for Best of Net and Best New Poets and received her MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University. Arah edits at Surging Tide Magazine and is pursuing her PhD in English at the University of Cincinnati. Catch her at arahko.com.

Janine Mogannam (she/her) is a Palestinian poet, librarian, and literary events curator from San Francisco (Ramaytush Ohlone land). A member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and Still Here SF, her writing has appeared in Kweli, Writing the Walls Down, The Margins, I Want Sky, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in two anthologies of Palestinian diasporic literature.

Crystal Odelle (they/she) is a queer trans storyteller, author of Trans Studies (Gold Line Press, forthcoming 2025), and chapbooks editor at Newfound. Their stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast, manywor(l)ds, bedfellows, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Lambda Literary fellow and Tin House Scholar, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in Permanent Record (Nightboat Books) and We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction (Neon Hemlock Press). She writes RPGs at Feverdream Games and serves as academic and administrative coordinator for the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Born in Santiago, Chile and raised in New England, Lily Philpott is an indigenous transracial adoptee. She has worked in the arts and culture nonprofit sector in New York City for close to a decade, and is a member of the Starlings Collective, a group supporting BIPOC adoptee writers; a co-chair of the International Literature Committee at the Brooklyn Book Festival; the curatorial committee of the 2024 PEN America World Voices Festival; and she volunteers as the Director of Programs with Singapore Unbound. She received her MFA in Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA).

Céline Semaan is a Lebanese-Canadian designer, writer, speaker, and advocate working at the intersection of environmental and social justice. She is a designer, writer, educator, strategist, and mother. She is the co-founder of Slow Factory where her work is focused on creating regenerative and reciprocal systemic change. Her debut book A Woman is a School is forthcoming in September 2024 with Slow Factory Press.

Elise Thi Tran (she/her) is a Vietnamese-Filipina-American writer and poet. She is the 2022 First Pages Prize winner and a fiction judge for NYC Midnight. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Blackbird, diode, The Kenyon Review, the minnesota review, Salt Hill, TIMBER, and elsewhere. Find Elise on Instagram @elise.tran.

Kristal Uribe-Cifuentes is a writer, translator and performer who lives and works between Dosquebradas, Colombia and Queens, NY. She received a BFA in theater and politics from The New School and is currently pursuing an MFA in nonfiction writing and literary translation at Columbia University. Her work explores the implications of private memory and its fabulations, the tinsel and agony that may be observed in the experience of womanhood, and the way we waltz around our vectors of abuse.

Mohammed Zenia is the author of Tel Aviv, James Baldwin’s Lungs in the 80s and Black Bedouin. Their work has appeared in e-flux, the Poetry Project and 240 magazine, among other publications.