, a Kennedy Center’s Next 50 fellow, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne’s books include Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky, Black Girl Magic, and banned books Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice and Woke Baby. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree awarded by Marymount Manhattan College and is the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center.

is author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems; and Shiny City as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency’s Governing Council and on Seattle City of Literature’s board. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They serve as Kundiman’s Pacific Northwest chapter co-lead and on the board. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.

is an Axinn Fellow at New York University and former Periplus Collective Fellow (2022-2023). Her fiction and creative nonfiction has been supported by Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Writing by Writers, DVAN, The Sun, and Roxane Gay’s, The Audacity. A 2019-2020 Princeton in Asia Public Health Fellow in Vietnam and former humanitarian aid worker, she has also reported on food/water security, refugee, and climate issues from Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Indonesia, Colombia, Guatemala, Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

(he/him) is a writer, performer & educator. His work focuses on intersectional themes of race, gender, queer life, and social justice education. He is the author of The Willies (Winner of the 2021 Midwestern Independent Book Award and a 2021 Foreword Reviews Gold Medal) and Adoption (Winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Award), and his writing has been featured on programming for HBO, in The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He has toured the United States as a guest artist, lecturer and trainer, and was the featured performer at President Obama’s Grassroots Ball at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration.

is a literary artist, editor, educator, and winner of the Fern Academy Prize. The author of How to Not Become the Breaking (Gateway Literary Press, 2025) her writing, interviews, and visual art appear in BOMB Magazine, Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Epoch, DIAGRAM, EcoTheo Review, Northwest Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Two of her essays have been recognized as notable by Best American Essays. In her transdisciplinary practice, she works back and forth over membranes of genre and media, channeling text-based works into sonic, tactile, visual, and durational installations. In doing so, she seeks to expand the definition of literary art and where we expect to encounter it. Her mission is to free text-based works from pages and stages and to spark delight by interweaving literary art into the path of everyday public life. A Jack Straw Writer and Tin House alum, her work is supported by 4Culture, Centrum, City of Burien, Civita Institute, Invoking the Pause, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Marble House, Mineral School, Seattle Public Library, Shunpike, Vermont Studio Center, and Willapa Bay AIR. She resides on the ancestral lands and waters of the Dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish) and Bəqəlšuł (Muckleshoot) peoples.

(she/her) is a poet, organizer, and professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, OR. She’s competed multiple times on national spoken word stages and toured with her poetry across North America. Her work has been published through Moria Magazine, Pine Row Press, Vagabond City Lit, and more, as well as in several poetry anthologies. A Best of the Net nominated artist, Julia has run the poetry mic Slamlandia since 2018, co-created the Bigfoot Poetry Festival in 2019, and she was elected to the board of the Oregon Poetry Association in 2024. Her debut full length collection, ‘weirdo’, was published through Game Over Books in 2022. Find more about her at @geekgirlgrownup.

, a first-generation Armenian-American writer, earned her MFA from Pacific University in 2023. She received a Teaching Fellowship from Anaphora Arts (2024), a Pacific University MFA Merit Scholarship (2021), and residencies from Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and Rockvale Writers’ Colony. She has led generative workshops using sensory-driven prompts and craft constraints and has given craft talks on aspects of the horror genre. She is currently developing a four-part Horror Lecture Series and has been invited to present from it at the Thunderdome Conference, The Writer’s Center, and CALYX Press events. Atina Hartunian writes literary cartoons—not the kind you’d find in The New Yorker. Her stories are more like animated cartoons, which makes sense when you grow up watching She-Ra and The Simpsons. Just read her work, and you’ll see. She is a native Los Angel-ian.

is the author of��Boys of Alabama, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and shortlisted for the Stonewall Book Award. Their other books include the Lambda Literary Award finalist Pretend We Live Here and the micro-memoir��A Little in Love with Everyone.��Their second novel, Headfirst, is forthcoming with Roxane Gay Books in 2027. Genevieve’s work has appeared in Elle, Oprah Magazine, McSweeney’s, BOMB, Bookforum, and Electric Literature, and was featured in Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing. They have received fellowships and artist residencies from the Fulbright Program, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, Caldera Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Vermont Studio Center. They live in Portland, Oregon, with their wife and dog.

is a poet, emcee, and Hip Hop Theater artist from Saint Paul, MN, with a deep and resounding love for Black people. Her work explores themes of Black love, liberation, politics, and Afro-Futurism. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and abroad as a public performance artist committed to the power of narrative change through the arts. Her writing can be found in We Are Meant to Rise (University of Minnesota Press), A Moment of Silence (Tru Ruts and The Playwrights Center), the Minnesota Humanities Center’s anthology entitled, Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press) and more.

is a Chinese-Iranian writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her debut poetry collection, , was selected by Patricia Smith for publication in the Miller Williams Poetry Series at University of Arkansas Press, and is forthcoming in Spring 2024.��A winner of the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Prize, Saba holds an MFA from UC Davis, where she was a Dean’s Graduate Fellow for Creative Arts. She is the Poetry Editor at Sundog Lit.

is the author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History (Melville House), which was named a best book of 2024 by the San Francisco Chronicle. A former editor at The Nation magazine, she received a Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study fellowship and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korea Foundation. She attended the Tin House and Writer’s Hotel writing workshops and was awarded residences at Mesa Refuge, Anderson Center, Mineral School and Ragdale. Her articles and interviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, Writer’s Digest, and The Rumpus. She lives in Oakland with her family.

’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) won the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, Tin House, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. The winner of the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, she is the editor-in-chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a member of the She Who Has No Master(s) collective.

is a writer and math tutor. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, Copper Nickel, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, Zyzzyva, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship and support from MacDowell, Tin House and Djerassi.

is a Moscow-born, Philadelphia-based poet and editor. Her poetry collection, Toska (Deep Vellum) was a 2024 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been published by the American Poetry Review, The Poetry Foundation, Jewish Currents, The Poetry Project, b l u s h, swamp pink, the tiny, and more.

(she/they) is a Korean diasporic writer, baker, and mental health advocate with more than a decade in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia. They are currently at work on Bad Magic, a coming-of-age addiction memoir which examines how we return to our true selves after reality and illusion become one. A 2023 Periplus Fellow, she has received support from Anaphora Arts, Stove Works, and Tin House Summer Workshop. In 2021, she published Have You Received Previous Psychotherapy or Counseling? through zines + things, and her essays can be found in Provecho, The Rumpus, Memoir Magazine, and elsewhere. Based in Portland, they lead an annual food & writing workshop series called Feasting on Words, which has been funded by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and Fernland Studios.

is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, GILT, was released by YesYes Books and won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Published by Black Lawrence Press in October 2022, her second book, summonings, won the 2021 Hudson Prize and was shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, Shirali is also the recipient of prizes and honors from PEN America, VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, & Cosmonauts Avenue. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She serves as Contributing Editor for swamp pink and lives in Philadelphia.

was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of Bluff (2024), Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award; [insert] Boy (2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Smith is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, Voices of Our Nation (VONA), and elsewhere. They are a founding member of the multigenre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. Their writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks. In poetry slam, Smith is a 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and the reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Champion, and was on the 2014 championship team Sad Boy Supper Club. In 2014 they were the festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam, and were awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Her queer horror novelette Helen House was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle, an assistant fiction editor at Foglifter, and the former managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and others. Some of her culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She has held fellowships with Tin House and Lambda Literary.

��is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press 2022), was awarded Texas Institute of Letters’ John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. ​She earned an MFA at Rutgers University—Newark and has been the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University, National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Program, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at University of Texas-Austin, The Huntington, and CantoMundo. Her writing has further been supported by residencies at Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She is currently an associate with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where she co-edits and writes for Letras Latinas Blog 2, in addition to working on other related projects. You can also find her on Instagram .

Zelmira Stevens Vindas, born in 1999, is a queer Costa Rican-American writer and artist based in Portland, Oregon. She studied creative writing at С��è��ý, where she self published her two novellas, Love be with You, and Los Cuentos. When she isn’t writing, you can catch her dancing, painting, and going on adventures with her friends and chihuahua.

Holly Zhou is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from the California desert, the unceded territory of the Cahuilla and Mojave peoples. Holly’s poetry and prose have been published in Foglifter, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. They are the winner of the 2023 Death Rattle Penrose Poetry Prize and the 2024 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Prize. Holly enjoys thinking about strangeness, saunas, rock formations, and flight.

is a 2017 NEA Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) and the forthcoming, Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He writes, edits, and teaches in Southeast Los Angeles.

is the author of the chapbook Unmonstrous (YesYes Books, 2019). His poems appear in DIAGRAM, Nashville Review, The Common, Pleiades, and other places. He directs the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and coordinates the writing center at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. For more, visit johnallentaylor.com.

A. E. Wynter is a Black writer and editor from New York. She currently lives in St. Paul, MN, where she has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series, and most recently, participated in a regional Cave Canem workshop. Her in-progress novel Far Cry From A Woman was a finalist in the 2021 Miami Fellowship for Emerging Writers and her fiction has appeared in Tulip Tree Review. Wynter won first place in the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Trade Review and Water~Stone Review. She is an Editor at Copper Canyon Press.

is the author of Philomath, selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Sally Keith, shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and awarded the 2022 Levis Reading Prize. She grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range, and received her education from Cornell University; Bennington College; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and New York University, where she was the Jill Davis Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, POETRY, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere.

Justin Boening is the author of Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, as well as Self-Portrait as Missing Person, which was awarded a Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. He is a recipient of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University, and a Henry David Thoreau Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Narrative, and TYPO, among others. A graduate of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Boening is currently a senior editor at Poetry Northwest, and is cofounding editor at Horsethief Books.

, from Portland, Oregon, is an Indian American writer. A 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing, her work appears in��Apogee,��Passages North,��The Yale Review,��The Rumpus,��Indiana Review, Roxane Gay’s��The Audacity,��Pleiades,��McNeese Review,��wildness,��Boston Review,��The Margins, and the anthology��A World Out of Reach��(Yale University Press). A Tin House, Bread Loaf, and Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference Scholar, she has also received recognition from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and The de Groot Foundation. She holds a B.A. in English from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She is working on a novel exploring loss, desire, and joy in three generations of a South Indian American family.

Mason Martinez (they/them) is a Latinx, queer writer from NYC. Recipient of the Ginny Wray Senior Prize and the ‘23 SAFTA Fall Residency, their work explores today and tomorrow’s environmental issues. After graduating from Purchase College with a BA in Creative Writing, Mason is now a freelance writer and Managing Fiction Editor of Chaotic Merge Magazine. Their work has been featured in Defunkt Magazine, The institutionalized Review, Yuzu Press, and more.

is a poet��based��in��Los��Angeles. His work has appeared��in many standards, including��Poetry, The Nation, Best American Poetry ���Ի���Poem A Day. He currently teaches at the windward school and, for the last six years, has been developing workshops��for writers living with Aphasia and Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI).

��earned an MFA at Rutgers University, Newark. He’s a former Literary Arts Oregon Fellow and currently serves as poet laureate for Clark County, WA (2021-2024). His debut poetry collection,��We Meant to Bring It Home Alive, was a finalist for the Red Hen Press and Kundiman prizes and was published by Alternating Current Press in 2019. Outside of writing, he works for Multnomah County supporting social service programs in education, domestic violence prevention, and housing stability.

��is an artist and writer, schooled by Do-It-Yourself culture and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx, NY. For ten years, Celeste co-directed Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project. She served as long-standing guest curator for MIX NYC Experimental Film Festival and OUTsider Festival (2012-2018), and screened work at film festivals in Montreal, Tijuana, Korea, and beyond. Celeste toured the West Coast with Sister Spit. With support from CA Arts Council and SFAC Writers Corps, she launched QTPOC Free School, and facilitated LGBTQ history workshops for youth through Queer Ancestors Project. She’s published in��AWAY, Alta,��cream city review,��and elsewhere. Celeste is now focused on writing her family memoir,��examining intergenerational trauma and resistance. She’s an alumna of Seattle Central Community College.

(she/her) is a biracial, bisexual woman who has spent her life navigating liminal spaces, inspiring her to produce trans-media projects such as To Love the Coming End (Book*hug/Chin Music Press 2017) and The Gift (Book*hug 2019). Her most recent book is a lyric memoir with music entitled One and Half of You (Talonbooks 2021). She is the fiction editor at Tahoma Literary Review, a mentor at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio, and the leader of the band The Deep Cove. Her verse-novel with photographs, Wet, is forthcoming Spring 2024. Leanne lives on the unceded and occupied Traditional Territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations.

Louisiana born and Portland-based, is the author of the poetry collection God Themselves and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary). She was the inaugural poetry winner of the John Lewis Writing Award from the Georgia Writers Association, and her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020, The Washington Square Review, The Offing Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. Her spoken word poems have been featured by Write About Now, Speak Up Poetry Series, and Button Poetry. She is a graduate of Tulane University.

is a Samoan-Haole settler who was born and raised on the illegally occupied island of O‘ahu. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. Her work has received support from Oregon Literary Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and has been published or is forthcoming in Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, Catapult, and elsewhere. Next summer, Mariah’s first prose chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle, will be published as part of the Inch series at Bull City Press. Mariah has taught or will teach writing at the University of Oregon, Loft Literary, the Young Writers’ Institute, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU. She is a fiction editor at TriQuarterly and is the nonfiction editor at Grist, A Journal of the Arts.

’s second book,��Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency��(BOA Editions), was a best book of 2022 according to the��Boston Globe,��Electric Lit, NPR, ���Ի���others. It was also named a 2023 Notable Book by the American Library Association. His debut,��When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities��(BOA Editions),��was long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including��The��New York��Times��and three editions of��The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts,��and United States Artists. He teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New��England College and Stonecoast. With Sam Herschel Wein and a brilliant team, he edits��Underblong.

(he/they) is a lollygagging plum of a poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. They have an MFA from the University of Tennessee and were awarded a 2022 Pushcart Prize. Their third chapbook,��Butt Stuff Flower Bush, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press. He co-founded and edits��Underblong. They have recent work in��American Poetry Review,��The Cincinnati Review, ���Ի���Gulf Coast, among others.

The first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate, multidisciplinary artist is Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington where he founded pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. He is the author of the children’s book, A is for Affrilachia and eleven collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded an NAACP Image Award and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award. He is also the author of Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, winner of a Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride. Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. A Cave Canem fellow, his honors also include a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. His most recent collection is Masked Man, Black: Pandemic & Protest Poems.

is a poet-scholar and Associate Professor of creative writing and Africana literature at the University of Kentucky. Her critical work has been published in��Journal of Postcolonial Writing,��South Atlantic Review,��Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies,��College Language Association Journal,��and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in��A Gathering Together, Interviewing the Caribbean,��A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia,��ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness, among other periodicals��and anthologies. Her chapbook��Fear of Dogs & Other Animals��was published by Central Square Press. Shauna��tends a small, hopeful provision ground at her home in the East End Artists’ Village in Lexington, and she remains intrigued by the environmental linkages between her rural Jamaican upbringing and her US-Kentucky life.

Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a queer poet and teaching artist from Seattle, and has taught everything from summer camps to university classes. She’s received fellowships and residencies from Jack Straw, the Hugo House, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Repertory Theater, and is a proud alum of Hedgebrook and of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives near the Salish Sea with her cat and is always looking for good dairy-free pastries. Arianne is the 2023-2025 Washington State Poet Laureate.

debut story collection��We Had No Rules, came out in April 2020 from Arsenal Pulp Press and was�� selected by��Poets & Writers��for their First Fiction series.��Tribes Magazine��says Corinne is “very good at writing stories that [make] the reader feel very bad”, ���Ի���BOMB Magazine��named them “the love child of Monique Wittig and Jeanette Winterson”. Corinne’s essays and book reviews have appeared in��The New York Times,��The Brooklyn Rail,��Bomb Magazine, ���Ի���The Baffler. A two time MacDowell fellow, Corinne is a teaching artist in Seattle where they’ve been working for Writers in the Schools and Hugo House since 2011.