Angie Sijun Lou is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Best Small Fictions, Joyland, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow, a Fiction Editor at FENCE, a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an instructor at San Quentin State Prison. She has received fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Millay Arts, the Calfornia Arts Council, and the Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference. She lives in Oakland.

Autumn Fourkiller is a writer from rural Oklahoma. She is a 2022 Ann Friedman Fellow and Tin House Summer Scholar. Her work is current or forthcoming in Longreads, Catapult, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. Her newsletter, "Dream Interpretation for Dummies," (sadboyhowdy.substack.com) is where Dear Abby meets Native Americana. She is currently at work on a novel about "ghosts," Indigenous and otherwise. Find her on Instagram (@sadboyhowdy) or at autumnfourkiller.com.

Bahareh's hometown in Iran is called Khooninshar, or “city of blood” for the carnage it saw as the primary battlefront of the Iran-Iraq war. It forced her indigenous ethno-religious community to diaspora. After escaping to India, she almost died of malaria, inspiring her to become a pediatrician. Through it all, she found solace in poetry and writing. She can be found at baharehkeith.com, Instagram: @baharehkeith,  and Twitter: @BaharehWrites

Bureen Ruffin is a writer and educator based in New York City. Her work has most recently appeared in Of Note magazine. A recipient of a Callaloo Fellowship, she is working on her first book. She teaches writing at The New School, where she also received an MFA in Creative Writing.

Carolina Hotchandani is a poet and Goodrich Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she teaches courses on literature, writing, and the medical humanities. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Missouri Review (poem of the week), New Ohio Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and other journals. She received two Rona Jaffe scholarships to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2021 and was a Pushcart nominee in 2017. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska with her husband and daughter.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is also the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book A Is for Asian American (Haymarket Books), which will be published in May 2023. You can find her @cathylinhche on social media and at cathylinhche.com.

Dana Fang is a queer, nonbinary writer and artist from the Midwest. They received their M.F.A from the Iowa Writers Workshop and are currently a P.h.D candidate in the Poetics Program at University at Buffalo.

Em North is a genderqueer writer who has lived in eleven states in the past decade. They received their MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University, and their work has appeared in Conjunctions, Lightspeed, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, and elsewhere. In previous lives, they’ve done research in observational cosmology and Lie algebras, caretook a ranch in the San Juans, taught snowboarding and creative writing, and trained horses. Their debut novel, IN UNIVERSES, is forthcoming with Harper Books in 2024. Find them at emznorth.com.

féi hernandez is a trans, Inglewood-raised, formerly undocumented immigrant author of the full-length poetry collection Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications 2020), which was on NPR’s Best Books of 2020. They are a Define American Fellow for 2021 and are currently the Board President of Gender Justice Los Angeles. They have been published in POETRY, Autostraddle, Immigrant Report, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Somewhere We are Human, and more.

Gisselle Yepes is a 23-year-old Puerto Rican and Colombian storyteller from the Bronx. They are currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University, where they have received the Bertolt Clever Poetry Prize and the Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing. Gisselle’s “Not an Ode to April 22, 2019” won Missouri Review’s 2021 Poem of the Year. Their work has also appeared in Gulf Coast, The Academy of American Poets, and voicemail poems. Gisselle holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University, where they earned the Winchester Fellowship, the Sophie and Anne Reed Prize, and the award for Connecticut Poetry Laureate.

Helen Armstrong (she/her) is a queer woman who lives and writes at the base of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. She's graduating in September with her MFA from Brown University, and has been published in Black Warrior Review, Jellyfish Review, and others. She lives with her wife, two cats, and several dying houseplants. Find her at helenkarmstrong.com or, in bite-sized pieces on Twitter @hkawrites.

Laura Cresté is the author of You Should Feel Bad, winner of a 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2021-2022 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review's "Poem of the Week" series, Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, Cero Magazine and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from New York University.

Lindsay Ferguson is a writer and visual artist based in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in Barrelhouse and Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize, the 2021 anthology for winners of the PEN America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. When she's not writing, Lindsay can be found exploring other artistic pursuits and helping nonprofits wrangle their communications. Find her on social media as @lindsrferg across platforms.

Manuel is a writer and translator from Monterrey, México. He has been a fellow or scholar at the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Community of Writers. His work appears in Puerto del Sol, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cutthroat Magazine, and has been anthologized in Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. Currently, he is the translator for the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts and for A Leer Más Cuentos. He has completed his first novel, School of Artistas Inmigrantes, and is studying a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver. Find him: @manucalvi & manucalvillo.com.

Riley MacLeod is a trans writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. Most recently he was editor-at-large at gaming news site Kotaku. He was co-founder of Topside Press, an independent press dedicated to transgender fiction, and he won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award in transgender fiction as co-editor of Topside's The Collection: Short Fiction From The Transgender Vanguard. You can find him on Twitter at @rcmacleod, where he is probably talking about unions.

Somi Jun is a Korean writer from Los Angeles. They are pursuing an MFA in poetry at UC Irvine.

Uche Okonkwo is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and has an MFA in Fiction from Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Ploughshares, A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Lagos Noir, Ellipsis, Saraba, and others. Okonkwo has received residencies and scholarships from Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Writers Omi, the Anderson Center, and Bread Loaf. She was the 2020-2021 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy and is a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow

Amanda J. Floresca (she/her) is a YA writer from Walterboro, South Carolina. She’s a biracial Filipina-American who enjoys writing about diverse and edgy characters in small town settings. Her short fiction has appeared in Short Story America and Owl Hollow Press. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College and is currently a graduate student at the University of South Carolina, completing a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. When she’s not doing homework or spending time with her children, she’s working on her debut novel. Find her on Instagram @ajflorescawrites

aureleo sans is a flamingo.  She is also a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, formerly unhoused poet and writer with a disability, who resides in San Antonio, Texas. She is a VONA alumnus, a Periplus fellow, and a creative nonfiction associate editor at jmww. She was named the second-place winner of Fractured Lit's 2021 Micro Fiction Contest, a longlister for the 2021 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize longlist and a semi-finalist for the 2021 American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize. Her work has been published in Passages North, HAD, Shenandoah, Electric Literature and elsewhere.  She is a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2022 Best Microfiction nominee.  Find aureleo on Twitter @aureleos.

Crystal K. is a queer trans writer, chapbooks editor at Newfound, and author of the novel Goodnight. Their flash stories have appeared in Gertrude, Passages North, Peach Mag, [PANK], Hobart, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Lev has attended the Tin House Workshop and been nominated for Best of the Net. They write RPGs at Feverdream Games.

erin rachel is a writer of young adult and adult fiction. Her early love of science fiction and fantasy led to her fascination with the power we have to refashion our lives through expansive thinking and creativity. She is the founder of a social impact design studio that uses decolonized design practices to bring to life not-too-distant futures. She is currently working on a young adult speculative fiction novel. When she is not writing fiction, you can find her writing musicals, practicing design, or teaching at local colleges and through her studio. Learn more at byerinrachel.com or follow her on Instagram and Twitter @by_erinrachel  

Endria Isa Richardson is a black, malaysian, and gay american writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. Endria writes about ghosts, monsters (including the monster of white supremacy), and the catastrophic failure of systems that are supposed to keep us safe. Her essays have appeared most recently in Black Warrior Review, Alpinist, and Backpacker, and her speculative fiction is in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, FIYAH, Nightmare, and other fantastic/al magazines. Her work has received notable mentions in the Best American Essays and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies, and a runner-up award from the Black Warrior Review nonfiction contest. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise and VONA workshops. In her past life, Endria was a prison abolitionist lawyer. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories, and a novel. You can see more of her work at www.endriarichardson.com.

Finola P. Davidson (she/her) writes YA horror and science fiction. She received her BA in English from Yale University and her PhD in English from the University of Notre Dame. She is represented by Carlisle Webber of Fuse Literary.

After completing her BA in English at Tuskegee University, Dr. Fredrika Atkins wanted to find a career that would allow her the leverage to make a difference while still pursuing her passion for writing.  Starting out in marketing while pursuing her Master’s in Integrated Marketing Communications in Chicago, Illinois at Roosevelt University in 2006 gave her the opportunity to do just that.   Fredrika has worked for non-profit and for-profit organizations before moving into Medicare Sales ten years ago.  While working full-time at WellCare, she also studied at Capella University in their Doctor of Business Administration, Strategy, and Innovation program, graduating in (2015).   Recently, Fredrika relocated to Oakland, California for a new position and opportunities that will afford her the space and platform to pursue her writing.  Fredrika’s experiences have allowed her to create innovative and fresh ways of writing about uncomfortable topics for young adults. Dr. Atkins is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and authored her first book, A Comparative Analysis of Factors Related to the Performance of Ethnic Majorities and Minority-Owned Small Businesses in Alabama, it was published in (2015 ) by  ProQuest-CSA, LLC ). Social Media Handles Facebook: Fredrika Atkins LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/fredrikaatkins Instagram: DocFreeFree

Heather Quinn (they/them) is an essayist and photographer living in Saint Paul with their husband and two children. A Minnesota native, they spent most of their childhood and early adulthood in Southern California, and their work frequently features the desert landscape around the Salton Sea in the southeastern corner of the state. They earned their MFA from Portland State University, and they were a 2019–2020 Loft Mentor Series fellow and a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellow. They are working on a memoir, This is How You Disappear, about the California desert and their father’s suicide. Find them on Instagram @heatherfquinn and at heatherfquinn.com.

Kyle Carrero Lopez was born to Cuban parents in northern New Jersey. He co-founded LEGACY, a production collective by and for Black queer artists, and is the author of MUSCLE MEMORY, the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books contest. His recent publications include Prolit, Best New Poets 2021, Poem-a-Day, and The Cincinnati Review. He holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. Find him at kylecarrerolopez.com and on Twitter @kycarrerolopez.

Liam Morrissey was born and raised in Chicago. He has spent most of the past decade living in Los Angeles and working in film and television production. He is currently a second year MFA candidate in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he teaches courses on literature and creative writing.

Maggie Nye is a writer and editor living in Bloomington, Indiana, and a forthcoming MacDowell fellow. Her work has appeared in Passages North, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places. Her first, yet unpublished novel was a finalist in Red Hen Press, Autumn House Press, and Steel Toe Books contests. She is presently working on her second novel: a strange, radical re-writing of the Medusa myth.

Marta Balcewicz lives in Toronto. Her fiction appears in Catapult, Tin House online, Washington Square Review, and other places. Her debut novel, Big Shadow, is forthcoming from Book*hug Press in spring 2023. You can find her at martabalcewicz.com and on Instagram @wiczcraft. (Photo by Angela Lewis.)

Miriam Ho Nga Wai (she/her) is a writer, editor and architect from Hong Kong. She has lived across southeast Asia and western Europe, and now lives in a multi-generational household in Toronto. She is a co-editor of The Site Magazine (www.thesitemagazine.com), an award-winning journal of architecture, place-making and cultural criticism, and a fiction reader at Guernica. She is hard at work on a short story collection and a novel in the stolen hours before her child wakes up.

Rory Gilhoul (they/he) is a speculative fiction writer currently based in Texas. Born in Brooklyn to a Scottish and Egyptian family, Rory spent their early childhood in Edinburgh before moving back to the United States. In 2021 they completed a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin. Their academic research focuses on the nexus of folklore and public memory. Rory is a co-founder of Wayward Warren Collective, a forthcoming online literary publication specializing in creative nonfiction about the politics and aesthetics of “the weird.” You can find Rory on Twitter @gilhouligan.

Sam Heaps is a genderqueer writer, visual artist, and organizer, currently living in Philadelphia where they teach writing. They have published in Communion Arts Journal, Entropy, Taco Bell Quarterly, and many other brave journals and anthologies. They are a 2022 VCCA Fellow. Heaps' debut PROXIMITY is forthcoming from CLASH Books January 2023.

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between Cairo and NYC. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, MQR, Four Way Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry London, Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2020, among others. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

Shakeema Smalls is South Carolina.  Her work has been published in a variety of outlets including Blackberry: A Magazine, Tidal Basin Review, The Fem, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and Rigorous, among others.

Urvashi Bahuguna is a poet and essayist based in the Bay Area. She is the author of Terrarium (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective) and No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (Penguin, 2021).