Camille U. Adams, Ph.D., is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Camille is the author of the memoir How To Be Unmothered, forthcoming in spring of 2025 with Restless Books. Her manuscript was recognized as a finalist in the Restless Books Prize in New Immigrant Writing 2023. Camille earned her MFA from City College, CUNY and a Ph.D. in Creative Nonfiction from FSU. She has received five Pushcart Prize nominations and three Best of the Net nominations for her published CNF work in literary magazines. Her writing has also received recognition as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2022. Among Camille’s awarded fellowships is an inaugural Tin House Reading Fellowship, an inaugural Granta nature writing workshop fellowship, a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, a Community of Writers Fellowship, and a Roots Wounds Words Fellowship. Camille is also a Tin House alum and has received support from Kenyon Writers Workshop, VONA, and others. She has served as a juried reader for Tin House for two consecutive years, as a CNF editor at Variant Lit, and as an assistant editor at Split Lip Magazine and at The Account. Camille’s memoir writing is featured in Passages North, Citron Review, XRAY Literary Magazine, Variant Literature, The Forge Literary Magazine, Kweli Magazine, and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing and teaching, Camille can be found on Twitter at @Camille_U_Adams where she spends way too much time.
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is a recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Anney Bolgiano is a writer and educator from Maryland. Her debut visual poetry chapbook, FLAT-PACK, won the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2021 Chapbook Contest. Anney’s essays, poems, collages, and stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, DIAGRAM, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Nashville Review, Salamander, The Rupture, Thin Air, A Velvet Giant, HAD, CTRL + V and elsewhere. As an educator, Anney has experience working with students of (almost) all ages and with a variety of learning styles and differences, and loves connecting with people over the shared joy of writing and creating. She is currently at work on a hybrid novel.
Steven Espada Dawson is the author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner 2025). From East Los Angeles, and the son of a Mexican immigrant, he is a former Ruth Lilly Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. His poems appear in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as Poet Laureate.
Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) and The Book of Alice (forthcoming with Scribner Books, 2025-26). Forde has received nomination and recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery award, as a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Obsidian, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the “Interviews Editor” with Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and as an avid lover of colorful dresses. Find out more on her website: www.diamondforde.com
Larissa Monique Hauck is a queer visual artist with a BFA with Distinction from the Alberta University of the Arts (2014) and a B.Ed. from the University of Calgary (2023). She has been included in events such as Nextfest 2018 (Edmonton, AB), Nuit Rose 2016 (Toronto, ON), and the 9th Annual New York City Poetry Festival 2019 (New York, US). Her drawings and paintings continue to be featured in publications such as Creative Quarterly (US), Boomer Magazine (UK), Minerva Rising (US), and various others. Through the exploration of visual myth-making, Larissa confronts the notions of queer identity, the resilience of the natural world, and the parallels between the fluidity of nature, gender, and sexuality.
Nicole Homer is an educator, poet, writer, and performer. Their collection, Pecking Order, explores race and gender politics in the domestic sphere. She has enjoyed fellowships at Bread Loaf, Tin House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference and others. They live online at nicolehomer.com and lurk on social media as @realnicolehomer.
Kelly X. Hui is a fiction writer and abolitionist community organizer. A Luminarts fellow, she received the 2023 Adroit Prize for Prose, selected by Ocean Vuong, and recently turned down the 2024 PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers in solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian liberation struggle. You can find her on Twitter @halfmoonpoem.
Amelia K. lives in Georgia. Her website is bio.site/ameliak.
Tyler King is a writer from Houston, TX, attending Duke University. He was a 2021 Adroit Journal mentee in poetry, and his work can be found in The Margins and on Poets.org.
Stefanie Kirby lives and writes along Colorado’s Front Range. Her debut, Fruitful (Driftwood, 2024), is the winner of the 2023 Adrift Chapbook Contest. Her poems can be found in West Branch, phoebe, The Massachusetts Review, The Maine Review, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.
Lara Longo is the Executive Director of Strategy and Growth at The Atlantic and has an MA in Cultural Studies from King’s College London. Her writing has been published in Guernica, The Offing, The Baltimore Review, jmww, Peach Mag, and more. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Michele Lovell has recently completed a collection of stories about her time working in the mental health field. She has had work published in Hip Mama, Sky Island Journal, Sonora Review, Under the Gum Tree, Fourth Genre, and other publications. She lives in S.W. Washington.
Rosaleen Lynch is an Irish community worker, teacher and writer in the East End of London. As well as Janus Literary, her work has appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, HAD, Fractured Lit, Craft, SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, and Mslexia amongst others, and has been shortlisted by Bath Short Story Award, the Bridport Prize, and Quiet Man Dave Prize, and has won the HISSAC Flash Fiction Competition and the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024; she has a collection-workbook, 52 Stories: A Toolkit for Readers and Writers, forthcoming with Adhoc Fiction and can be found at 52Quotes.blogspot.com.
Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Verse Daily, Plume, The Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree (December 2024, Lily Poetry Review Books), as well as The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was short-listed for the Massachusetts Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER.
James McDermott‘s poetry collections include Wild Life (Nine Arches Press) and Manatomy (Burning Eye Books). James’s plays published by Samuel French/Concord Theatricals include Jab (Finborough Theatre), Time and Tide (Park Theatre/Tour) and Rubber Ring (Pleasance Islington/Tour).
DW McKinney is a writer and editor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. A 2024 Torch Literary Arts Fellow, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, PERIPLUS Collective, Writing By Writers, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. McKinney’s work appears in Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, TriQuarterly, and Narratively, among others. A farmer by day, she also serves as a nonfiction editor at Shenandoah. Learn more about her at dwmckinney.com.
Sihle Ntuli is a poet, editor and classicist from Durban, South Africa, His honours include being shortlisted for the 2024 Alpine Poetry Prize, Runner Up for the 2024 Classical Association Poetry Competition & Winner of the 2024 Patricia Kailis Writing Fellowship. Ntuli is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Rumblin (uHlanga 2020) and The Nation (River Glass Books 2023), alongside two full-length collections Stranger (Aerial Publishing 2015) & Zabalaza Republic (Botsotso Publishing 2023).
Porsha Olayiwola is a individual world poetry slam champion and the author of the collection i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston. She is a 2020 Academy of American Poets poet laureate fellow. Olayiwola is the assistant professor of poetry at Emerson College.
Jamila Osman is a Somali writer, educator, and community organizer. She has taught creative writing from Portland to Palestine, from summer camps to juvenile detention facilities, and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She received the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the 2021 Black Warrior Review’s Flash Contest award, and The Bellingham Review’s 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the author of the poetry chapbook A Girl is a Sovereign State (Akashic 2020).
Sodïq Oyèkànmí is a poet, dramaturge and translator from Nigeria. A 2022/23 Poetry Translation Centre (UK) UNDERTOW Fellow. He is a recipient of the Unserious Collective Fellowship (2023) and won the Sevhage/ Hyginus Ekwuazi Poetry Prize (2023). His works are published/ forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Lucent Dreaming, Modern Poetry in Translation, North Dakota Quarterly, Passages North, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Taco Bell Quarterly and Uncanny Magazine. Find him on Twitter/X @sodiqoyekan and on Instagram @sodiq_oyekanmi.
Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised in Wrangell, a small island community is Southeastern Alaska. She’s a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQ group on the island. Prescott is also a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi, and writes frequently about Sámi diaspora and climate change in Alaska. Prescott is the author of four chapbooks, two full-length poetry books, and a short story collection. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she writes a column for the Juneau Empire called Planet Alaska.
Eduardo Roldan is a Latino writer from California with roots in Mexico and Guatemala. He graduated with an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and works within the alchemy of magical realism. He is fascinated in the space between the sublime, mystical, and mundane, and his writing explores cultural enlightenment and identity.
Claire Rychlewski is a writer living in Chicago. Her work has most recently appeared in pitymilk press’s DUETDUET series and dirt child’s volume 4. She is editor of prose for SARKA and the author of chapbook BORN TO ROT.
t.r. san is a trans lesbian poet and lover based in Yangon, Myanmar. They are a manuscript reader for Querencia Press.
Carolyn Schlam is an award-winning artist and author of four published books on art including The Creative Path: A View from the Studio on the Marking of Art, a book for creatives; The Zen of Art: With Notes on the Art of Life, which applies principles of zen philosophy to art-making; and The Joy of Art: How to Look at, Appreciate, and Talk about Art, her best-selling art appreciation book. The sequel titled More Joy of Art will be published in January, 2025. Carolyn lives and works in the Hudson Valley of New York. Her next project will be an illustrated modern fairytale. She invites you to visit her website and to get in touch; she loves to hear from viewers, readers and students.
Salonee Verma is a Jharkhandi-American writer and the co-founder of antinarrative (@antinarrativeZ), a collaborative zine. Her work has been published in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, GASHER, Shenandoah, A Velvet Giant, Barrelhouse, and more. A Graybeal-Gowen finalist, he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, American Voices, and more. She studies computer science at the University of Virginia. Find her online at saloneeverma.carrd.co.
Ziyi Yan (闫梓祎) is a Chinese writer. Her work is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Rust & Moth, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. Ziyi has been recognized nationally and internationally by The Poetry Society, Poetry Online, The National Foundation for the Advancement of Artists, The Fitzgerald Museum, The American Library of Poetry, and more. You can find her on Instagram @ziyiyan___ or visit her website.