Participants:

Kazim Ali: Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra, and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water.

Moncho Ollin Alvarado: Moncho aka @moncholapoet is a sister in residence in air, a Cihuayollotl trans Xicanx poet, translator, visual artist, and educator. She is the author of Greyhound Americans (Saturnalia Books 2022), which was the winner of the 2020 Saturnalia Book Prize, selected by Diane Seuss. She has been published in Hayden Ferry Review, Foglifter, Poets.org, and other publications. She has fellowships and residencies from LAMBDA Literary, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Troika House, and others. Alvarado is a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and has been featured at Brooklyn Museum, Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, Time Square Arts, PEN America, to name a few. Currently, she is working on a trans historical novel in verse and lives in Queens with her partner, cuddly dog, & meowling cat. monchoalvarado.com

Neelanjana Banerjee: Neelanjana’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies like Prairie Schooner, Weird Sister, Virginia Quarterly Review, PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them (Abrams Image, 2020), Good Girls Mary Doctors: South Asian Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (Aunt Lute Books, September 2016), and many other places. She is a co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), and The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press, 2016). She has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and a BA in English and Creative Writing from Oberlin College. She has had residencies at Hedgebrook, the Blue Mountain Center, and Dorland Mountain Arts, and received scholarships to attend the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute and the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her journalism has appeared on Teen Vogue, The Aerogram, The Center for Asian American Media Blog, LA Review of Books, Alternet, WordRiot, Colorlines, Fiction Writers Review and more. She is based in Los Angeles, where she is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, and teaches writing and publishing in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA and through private writing workshops.

bridgette bianca: bridgette is a poet and professor from South Central Los Angeles. Her first book of poetry, be/trouble, was released by Writ Large Press in 2020. When she is not sharing her poetry, she hosts two instagram series, Young, Black, and Tenure-Track where she documents her experiences in higher education and We Be Readin! Wednesdays where she discusses her romance reading obsession! Find her online at @bridgettebianca on instagram and bridgettebianca.com.

Shonda Buchanan: Shonda is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a USC Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow, and a Department of Cultural Affairs City of Los Angeles (COLA) Master Artist Fellow. She is the author of five books, including her memoir, Black Indian, which wone the 2020 Indie New Generation Book Award. She currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, and is a recipient of the Brody Arts Fellowship from the California Community Foundation, a Big Read grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and several Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grants. Shonda is currently a Writing Instructor for a first year seminar and a Senior Lecturer for the Department of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She recently completed a collection of poetry about Nina Simone and is working on her second memoir and a novel. Shonda lives and writes in her adopted home on Tongva and Chumash land in Los Angeles, California.

Elena Karina Byrne: Elena is a Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry recipient, and the author of five poetry collections including If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn Publishing, 2021). Her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews can be found in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Poetry International, Poetry Daily, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, APR, Plume, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, and elsewhere. Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena's the Programming Consultant & Poetry Stage Manager for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and Literary Programs Director for the Ruskin Art Club. She’s writing screenplays while completing a collection of hybrid essays entitled Voyeur Hour.

Jessa Calderon: Jessa is the Coordinator of Indigenous Oceans and Waters Protector Program for Sacred Places Institute. Jessa is a songwriter, published author, poet, hip hop artist, performer, hypnotherapist, massage therapist, energy worker and offers guided meditations. Jessa encourages our community and youth to find their healing mentally, physically and spiritually by sharing her words, music and practices. Jessa has had the privilege to work with community and youth from many Nations, helping them find themselves while helping them to feel good about themselves.

Dorothy Chan: Dorothy (she/they) is the author of five poetry collections, including Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum Books Fall 2023 / Spring 2024), BABE (Diode Editions, 2021), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). They were a 2023 finalist for the Roethke Poetry Award for Revenge of the Asian Woman, 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club for BABE, a 2020 and 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) BIPOC literary arts organization, run by women, femme, and queer editors of color. Chan was the 2021 Resident Artist for Toward One Wisconsin. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com.

Jos Charles: Jos is author of a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah, and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is the founding-editor of THEM, the first trans literary journal in the US, and engages in direct gender justice work with a variety of organizations and performers. Charles's poetry has appeared in Poetry, PEN, Washington Square Review, BLOOM, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. Among her awards are the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2015 Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship.

Gabrielle Civil: Gabrielle is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance art works around the world, most recently the déjà vu live (2022) at Beyond Baroque. Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), and the déjà vu (2022). Her work has appeared in New Daughters of Africa, Kitchen Table Translation, and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. Her poetry has been featured in Bone Bouquet, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day and The Poetry Foundation’s Vs Roll Call podcast. A 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist, she teaches at California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Anthony Cody: Anthony is the author of Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020), winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize. His debut has been recognized as a winner of the 2022 Whiting Award, 2021 American Book Award and a 2020 Southwest Book Award, as well as a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN/America Jean Stein Award, L.A. Times Book Award, and the California Book Award. Anthony is a Poets & Writers 2020 Debut Poet. He is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, CA with lineage in the Bracero Program and Dust Bowl. Anthony collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera’s Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio, serves as a poetry editor for Omnidawn, and is co-publisher of Noemi Press. His forthcoming collection, The Rendering, (Omnidawn) is coming out in the spring of 2023. He teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Randolph College. Visit his website at www.anthonycody.com.

Allison Hedge Coke: Allison’s recent honors include a 2022-2023 UC Mellon Dean’s Professorship, the 2021-2022 California Arts Council Legacy Artist Fellowship, 2021 AWP George Garrett Award, 2021 induction into the Texas Institute of Letters, 2020 Daniel & Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals at the University of Hawai‘i, 2019 Fulbright in Montenegro, 2018 First Jade Female Poetry Festival Sihui China Excellent Foreign Poet, 2016 US Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow. Her latest release is Look at This Blue, from Coffee House Press, 2022.

Brendan Constantine: Brendan is a poet based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in many of the nation’s standards, including Poetry, The Nation, Best American Poetry, Tin House, and Poem-a-Day. His most recent collections are Dementia, My Darling (2016) from Red Hen Press and Bouncy Bounce (2018) a chapbook from Blue Horse Press. New work is forthcoming in the Washington Square Review. A popular performer, Brendan has presented his work to audiences throughout the U.S. and Europe, also appearing on NPR's All Things Considered, TED ED, numerous podcasts, and YouTube. He currently teaches at the Windward School and, since 2017, has been developing poetry workshops for people with Aphasia and Traumatic Brain Injury.

Jose Hernandez Diaz: Jose is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) and Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Offing, Poetry, Raleigh Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology. He teaches creative writing online and edits for Frontier Poetry.

Angel Dominguez: Angel is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the Santa Cruz Mountains in Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of Desgraciado (the collected letters) (Nightboat Books, 2022), RoseSunWater (The Operating System, 2021) and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015). They were the 2021 Mazza writer in residence for San Francisco State University and have shared their work across the country in various venues, universities, and states of consciousness. You can find Angel’s words online and in print in various publications including BOMB Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, FENCE, Prolit Magazine, SFMOMA Open Space, and elsewhere. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean.

Kinsale Drake: Kinsale (Diné) is a writer and narrator whose work has appeared in Poets.org, The Adroit Journal, Yale Literary Magazine, TIME, NPR, Abalone Mountain Press, LACMA, NYU Gallatin, and elsewhere. She previously served as a National Student Poet; she currently edits Changing Wxman Collective. She is an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow, and the winner of the J. Edgar Meeker Prize for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets College Prize, and the Young Native Playwrights Award. Her work is forthcoming in Best New Poets, MTV, and elsewhere.

Sesshu Foster: Sesshu taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 35 years. He has also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Occidental College and Pomona College. His most recent books are City of the Future, winner of the 2019 CLMP Firecracker Award and ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, a novel co-written with artist Arturo E. Romo, published by City Lights in 2021.

Carribean Fragoza: Carribean is a fiction writer and journalist from South El Monte, CA. Her collection of stories Eat the Mouth That Feeds You was published in 2021 by City Lights and was a finalist for a 2022 PEN Award. Her co-edited compilation of essays, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte was published by Rutgers University Press and her forthcoming collection of essays Writing Home: New Terrains of California will be published by Angel City Press in 2023. She has published in Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Alta, BOMB, Huizache, KCET, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtNews, and Aperture Magazine. She is the Prose Editor at Huizache Magazine and Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Editor at Boom California, a journal of UC Press. Fragoza is the founder and co-director of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley in Greater Los Angeles.

Amy Gerstler: Amy’s most recent book of poems is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker and Paris Review. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor, and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical play. Her previous books of poems include Scattered at Sea, Dearest Creature, Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel. Oren’s Forest, a children’s book Gerstler created with artist/Illustrator Lindsey Burwell, was published in 2022. In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also written fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and art criticism.

Gustavo Hernandez: Gustavo is the author of the poetry collection Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press). His work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review, and The Slowdown podcast. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and lives in Southern California.

Anna Journey: Anna is the author of the poetry collections The Judas Ear, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series, and the essay collection An Arrangement of Skin. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Kien Lam: Kien is the author of Extinction Theory, winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. He is a Kundiman fellow and received his MFA from Indiana University. He lives in Los Angeles and works in esports and television.

Carlos Lara: Carlos is the author of The Green Record and co-author of The Audiographic As Data (Co-authored with Will Alexander). The poem “God Wave” was published as a chapbook in 2018. His poetry collection Like Bismuth When I Enter was published by Nightboat Books. Other poems and translations have appeared in Lana Turner, Seedings, Vestiges, Aurochs, Flag + Void, Gulf Coast, Omniverse, and elsewhere. He abides in Los Angeles.

Sarah Maclay: Sarah’s Nightfall Marginalia, her fifth full-length, will be out in 2023, from What Books Press. Other recent titles include The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence, with Holaday Mason, and Music for the Black Room (UT Press). Her poems, reviews, scripts, and essays have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Best American Erotic Poetry: From 1800 to the Present, The Writer’s Chronicle, Scenarios:Scripts to Perform, Poetry International, where she also served as Book Review Editor for a decade, and beyond. Her poems provide the lyrics for composer Kostas Rekleitis’s new album Identity Had Gone. A recipient of a City of LA Individual Fellowship, a Pushcart special mention, the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, a Best of the Net nomination, and a Yaddo residency, she teaches creative writing and literature at Loyola Marymount University, and conducts periodic workshops for Beyond Baroque.

Douglas Manuel: Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Long Beach, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. His first collection of poems, Testify, won an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry, and his poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with The University of Iowa's International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is a Bayard Rustin Fellow at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program. His second poetry collection, Trouble Funk, will be out in spring of 2023.

Tongo Eisen-Martin: Tongo is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, Someone's Dead Already was nominated for a California Book Award. His book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His latest book is Blood on the Fog. Tongo is currently San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.

Elizabeth Metzger: Elizabeth Metzger is the author of the chapbook Bed (Tupelo Press, 2021), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize, The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Horsethief Books, 2017). Her second full-length collection Lying In will come out with Milkweed Editions in April 2023 (and is available to pre-order now). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among others. Her prose has recently been published in Conjunctions, Literary Hub, Guernica, and Boston Review. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Cynthia Dewi Oka: Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA), and now serves as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine. For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for justice that center the experiences of the global majority. She lives in Los Angeles.

Carolie Parker: Carolie is a visual artist and writer with a background in foreign languages and art history. Her poetry has appeared in Sixth Finch, The Yale Review and Denver Quarterly; What Books Press published Mirage Industry, a book-length collection of her poetry, in 2016. She has exhibited her visual work widely in Los Angeles.

Tommy Pico: Tommy “Teebs” Pico is a poet, podcaster, and tv writer. He is author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, Feed, and myriad keen tweets including “sittin on the cock of the gay.” Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now splits his time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. He co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot and Scream, Queen! is poetry editor at Catapult Magazine, writes on the TV shows Reservation Dogs and Resident Alien, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.

Omar Pimienta: Omar is an artist/writer/scholar who lives and works in the San Diego / Tijuana border region. His artistic practice examines questions of identity, trans-nationality, emergency poetics, landscape and memory. He has published four books of poetry in U.S, México Argentina and Spain. He has won the Emilio Prado 10th International Publication prize from the Centro Cultural Generación del 27 Malaga Spain. He holds a Ph.D in Literature from the University of California San Diego and a MFA in Visual Arts from the same institution. He is currently member of the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte in the area of poetry.

Errant Press: Errant Press is a self-publishing project by Alan Sobrino. His work formally explores books' limits, often printing books outside their traditional codex form and exploring different mediums that stories can inhabit, proposing a flexible definition of what a book is.

Michael A. Reyes: Michael is a poet and children's picture book writer. He teaches Rhetoric, Composition, and Chicanx Literature at Cal Lutheran University. He’s received fellowships from VONA, Community of Writers, and Fine Arts Work Center, and has work featured in The Acentos Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, PANK, and others. He is currently the Assistant Editor of Poetry at The Offing magazine and is currently working on his first poetry collection about anti-Mexican public health policy in the US.

Sehba Sarwar: Sehba’s writings and art tackle borders and displacement. Her essays, fiction, and poems have appeared in publications including The New York Times’ Sunday Magazine, Los Angeles Times, LA Parent, Asia: Magazine of Asian Literature, Callaloo and elsewhere. Her short stories are anthologized by Feminist Press, Akashic Books, and Harper Collins India, while the second edition of her novel Black Wings was released in spring (Veliz Books 2019). She is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, where she spent the first half of her life in a home filled with artists, activists, and educators. She is based in Los Angeles, and her papers are archived at the University of Houston.

Alexis Sears: Alexis Sears's first book, Out of Order, won the the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was just published by Autumn House Press. Alexis received her BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has been widely published, including in Rattle's Poets Respond last month with her "Heartbreak Ghazal." She was a scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2019. Currently, she teaches 9th grade English in Oakland, California.

Prageeta Sharma: Prageeta is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019), Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). She is the founder of Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. She is the Henry G. Lee '37 Professor of English at Pomona College.

Lynne Thompson: Lynne Thompson is Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. Thompson is the author of three collections of poetry: Beg No Pardon, Start With A Small Guitar, and most recently Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. The recipient of multiple awards and fellowships including several Pushcart Prize nominations, Thompson sits on the Boards of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books and recently completed her term as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College. Her recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, New England Review, Black Warrior Review, Massachusetts Review, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others.

Amy Uyematsu: Amy is a sansei (third-generation Japanese American) poet and teacher from Los Angeles. She has six published collections–the most recent being That Blue Trickster Time (What Books Press, 2022). Her first poetry collection, 30 Miles from J-Town, won the 1992 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Amy taught high school math for LA Unified Schools for 32 years. Active in Asian American Studies when it first emerged in the late 60s, she penned “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America” and was co-editor of the widely-used UCLA anthology, Roots: An Asian American Reader.

Mai Der Vang: Mai is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of a 2022 American Book Award, and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First book Award of the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Vanessa Angelica Villareal: Vanessa was born in the Rio Grande Valley to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and fellowships from CantoMundo and Jack Jones Literary Arts. She is a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and an essay collection while raising her son in Los Angeles.

Jackie Wang: Jackie is a poet, harpist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism, as well as the chapbooks Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb and The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming. When not writing poetry, she researches race, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police.

Ellen Webre: Ellen is a biracial, Taiwanese-American poet, born in Hong Kong and raised in California. She attended the Creative Writing Conservatory of the Orange County High School of the Arts, and received a degree in screenwriting at Chapman University. She is currently acting as a social media marketing specialist and videographer for Moon Tide Press, is a co-host of Two Idiots Peddling Poetry, and is an editor of Freezeray Magazine. Ellen’s debut book, A Burning Lake of Paper Suns, was released in October 2021 with Moon Tide Press. Her poem “Metaphors for My Body in Midwinter” has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2021. Ellen’s other poems have most recently been published in A Moon of One’s Own, FreezeRay Press, Sh!t Men Say to Me Anthology in Response to Toxic Masculinity, DARK INK: A Horror Anthology, and Voicemail Poems.

Conney D. Williams: Conney is a poet, actor, community activist, and performance artist with three collections of poetry Leaves of Spilled Spirit from an Untamed Poet (2002) and Blues Red Soul Falsetto (2012). His new collection the distance of observation was released August 2021 on World Stage Press. He also has two critically acclaimed poetry cds: River&Moan and Unsettled Water.

Matthew Zapruder: The poems in Matthew Zapruder’s fifth collection ask, how can one be a good father, partner, and citizen in the early twenty-first century? Zapruder deftly improvises upon language and lyricism as he passionately engages with these questions during turbulent, uncertain times. Whether interrogating the personalities of the Supreme Court, watching a child grow off into a distance, or tweaking poetry critics and hipsters alike, Zapruder maintains a deeply generous sense of humor alongside a rich vein of love and moral urgency. The poems in Father’s Day harbor a radical belief in the power of wonder and awe to sustain the human project while guiding it forward.

Mariano Zaro: Mariano Zaro is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Decoding Sparrows (What Books Press), finalist of the Housatonic Book Award, and Padre Tierra (Olifante). His poems and short stories have been published in anthologies and literary journals in Spain, Mexico and United States. His translations include Buda en llamas (by Tony Barnstone), and Cómo escribir una canción de amor (by Sholé Wolpé). He is a professor of Spanish at Rio Hondo Community College (Whittier, CA). Website: www.marianozaro.com

Kelsey Bryan-Zwick: Kelsey (she/they) is a disabled, queer, bilingual immigrant, and author based in Los Angeles, California. Their debut poetry collection, Here Go the Knives (Moon Tide Press 2022)—part memoir, part magical realism, part illustration—focuses on their decades surviving with debilitating scoliosis. On the gram @theexquisitepoet.