Paola Capó-García is the author of Clap for Me That’s Not Me, selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of Rescue Press’s 2017 Black Box Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Volta, Latino Book Review, jubilat, Poetry Society of America, Academy of American Poets, and others. She is the co-founder/editor of the literary/arts journal littletell, alongside Maria Flaccavento. Originally from San Juan, PR, she now lives in San Diego, CA, where she teaches twelfth-grade English.

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Advantages of Being Evergreen, winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition, and of The Spectral Wilderness, selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbook The Gospel According to X. He is an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, and is currently back east working towards a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry about the Holocaust, with a special focus on atrocity in former Soviet territories. Julia is the author of “The Many Names for Mother,” selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize, forthcoming from Kent State University Press in fall of 2019, and “The Bear Who Ate the Stars” (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and Best New Poets 2018, among others. Julia edits Construction Magazine  and when not busy chasing her 3-year-old around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, Julia writes “Other Women Don’t Tell You,” a blog about motherhood.

Ellen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, “Like a Beggar” (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award and the Northern California Book Award. Previous books include “The Human Line” (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) and “Mules of Love” (BOA Editions, 2002) which won The Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the first major anthology of women’s poetry, “No More Masks!” (Doubleday, 1973). Her non-fiction books include “Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth” (HarperCollins, 1996), “I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse” (HarperCollins, 1983) and “The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse” (Harper Collins, 1988, 2008), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails. She currently teaches in the low residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and serves on the editorial team at Fence. His work has been recognized most recently with a New Works Grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Holloway Visiting Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Matuk is currently working on a collaboration with visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez that is forthcoming from Singing Saw Press.

Anne Lesley Selcer is the author of Sun Cycle, selected by CA Conrad as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 First Book Poetry Competition, as well as the essay collection Blank Sign Book and from A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain Press Award. Her writing on art includes Banlieusard, a book-length text for Artspeak, as well as essays for museum and gallery catalogs and art magazines. Writing occasionally manifests as moving image or sound.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a New York Times best-selling biography on A Tribe Called Quest called Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, February 2019), The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has two forthcoming books including a new collection of poems A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) and a history of Black performance in the United States titled They Don’t Dance No Mo’ (Random House, 2020).

Henk Rossouw’s book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in their boxset New-Generation African Poets: Tano. Poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. An assistant professor, Henk teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is from South Africa.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light (2013) and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (2017). Her most recent book of essays was nominated for the University of Iowa’s Essay Prize and won the CLMP Firecracker Award for nonfiction. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan.