Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx activist, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Born in South Central California and raised in Central Texas, they use their intersectional experiences to advocate for the rights of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people by interpreting policy’s impact on the individual using poetry, music, performance, and digital art.

They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, and the forthcoming poetry collection and debut memoir A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), and A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2025).

Source: FaylitaHicks.com

Dexter L. Booth is the author of Abracadabra, Sunshine (Red Hen Press, 2021), the chapbook Rhapsody (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2019), and the collection Scratching the Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was selected by Major Jackson. His poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2015, The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, The Golden Shovel Anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and Plume Poetry 9. Booth holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.

Source: DexterBoothWrites.com

James Cagney is the author of Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory (Nomadic Press, 2018), winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. His second book of poems, Martian (Nomadic Press, 2022), was selected by Mark Bibbins, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Ladan Osman to receive the 2021 James Laughlin Award. A Cave Canem fellow, Cagney lives in Oakland, California.

Source: Poets.org

Poet, novelist and professor Al Young was born in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He attended the University of Michigan before moving to the San Francisco Bay area, where he earned a BA in Spanish from the University of California-Berkeley. Young often read to musical accompaniment, and his poetry reflected his interest in music, specifically jazz and blues, as well as his life in California. His collections of poetry include Dancing: Poems (1969), The Song Turning Back Into Itself (1971), The Blues Don’t Change: New and Selected Poems (1982), Heaven: Collected Poems 1956–1990 (1992), The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990–2000 (2001), Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001–2006, and Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry (2008).

Young received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as poet laureate of California in 2005. He died in early 2021.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Poet, fiction writer, and editor Martha Ronk was born in Cleveland and earned a BA at Wellesley College and a Ph.D. at Yale University. With wry humor and formal curiosity, Ronk tests the limits of syntax and a literary convention in her work. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Silences (2019), Ocular Proof (2016); Transfer of Qualities (2013), a National Book Award long-list selection; Partially Kept (2012); Vertigo (2007), chosen by C.D. Wright for the National Poetry Series; and In a landscape of having to repeat (2004), winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award.

Ronk’s prose includes Glass Grapes: And Other Stories (2008), and Displeasures of the Table: memoir as caricature (2001). Her work has been featured in American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009) and Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (2008). Her additional honors include the PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

traci kato-kiriyama is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer/author, actor, arts educator & community organizer. They have most recently released their book Navigating With(out) Instruments. Since 1996, she has performed and written for theatre tours, productions, artist residencies, and performance collaborations in hundreds of venues throughout the country [incl. LaMaMa Cabaret (NY); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF); Enwave Theatre (Toronto); Inner-City Arts (LA); Los Angeles Theatre Center (LA); The Aratani Theater (LA); CounterPULSE (SF); Bindlestiff Studio (SF); Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia)].

Source: traci-kato-kiriyama.com

Matthew Dickman was raised by his mother in the Lents neighborhood of Southeast Portland along with his sister Elizabeth and twin brother, the poet Michael Dickman. After studying at Portland Community College and the University of Oregon, he earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center. He was the recipient of a 2009 Oregon Book Award and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

Dickman is the author of three full-length collections, All American Poem, which won the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, Mayakovsky's Revolver (W.W. Norton & Co, 2012), and Wonderland (W.W. Norton & Co, 2017); and co-author, with Michael Dickman, of 50 American Plays (Copper Canyon, 2012), and Brother (Faber & Faber, 2016). He is also the author of four chapbooks: 24 Hours (Poor Claudia, Portland & Onestar press, Paris, 2014), Wish You Were Here (Spork Press, 2013), Amigos (Q Ave. Press, 2007), and Something About a Black Scarf (Azul Press, 2008).

Source: MatthewDickmanPoetry.com

Bitting grew up in Pacific Palisades, studied theater at the University of California, Berkeley, and pursued careers in dance and culinary arts before turning her focus to writing in 2001. She received an MFA in writing and poetry from Pacific University, Oregon, in 2009. Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from Pacific University, Oregon. She is a Ph.D. candidate in mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Michelle is the Poet Laureate of Pacific Palisades and has won multiple grants from the Optimists Club and Poets & Writers Magazine for her teaching work in Los Angeles. A mother of two, she is married to the actor Phil Abrams.

Source: MichelleBitting.com

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Texas and raised in North Carolina, Canada, and on the Great Plains. Of mixed heritage, she is a poet, writer, and educator. Though she left school to work in the fields as a child, she later took advantage of tuition-free community ed classes at North Carolina State University while a field worker.

She is the author of the poetry chapbook Year of the Rat (1996); the full-length poetry collections Dog Road Woman (1997), Off-Season City Pipe (2005), Blood Run (2006 UK, 2007 US), Streaming (2014), an illustrated (by Dustin Illetewahke Mater) special edition Burn (2017); and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (2004, 2014).

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Lauren Russell is a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press 2017).

A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and VIDA / The Home School, and residencies from the Rose O’Neill Literary House, the Millay Colony, and City of Asylum/ Passa Porta. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2015 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others.

Source: LaurenRussellPoet.com