Aldo Amparán (http://aldoamparan.com) is a queer poet from the border cities of El Paso, TX, & Ciudad Juárez, CHIH, MX. He is a CantoMundo Fellow & finalist for the Alice James Award. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Fugue, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Washington Square Review & elsewhere.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His books are This Wound Is A World (UMinn Press 2019), NDN Coping Mechanisms (House of Anansi 2019), and the forthcoming A History of My Brief Body (Two Dollar Radio 2020).
Anthony Borruso has an MFA in creative writing from Butler University and is a reader for Split Lip Magazine. He suffers from Chiari Malformation and sometimes examines this in his poetry. Currently, he teaches composition at Tallahassee Community College. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Spillway, Mantis, THRUSH, Frontier Poetry, decomP, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere.
Guy Choate has published or has forthcoming essays in War, Literature, & the Arts, Louisville Review, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, and Cream City Review, among other places. He earned his MFA from The University of New Orleans, where he wrote a thesis about his lifelong relationship with gambling. He’s currently working on a manuscript about his attempt to walk every step from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. Guy directs the Argenta Reading Series in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where he lives with his wife, Liz, and their son, Gus. You can find him online at guychoate.com.
J. David is from Cleveland, Ohio and is Editor-in-Chief of Flypaper Lit. They probably love Julien Baker more than you do.
Saddiq Dzukogi is the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Poetry Society of America, Gulf Coast, African American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Verse Daily. He has won fellowships from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Ebedi International Writers Residency.
Federico Federici is a physicist, a translator and a writer. He lives and works between Berlin and the Ligurian Apennines. His texts have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Jahrbuch Der Lyrik 2019, Poet Lore, Sand, Trafika Europe, Magma, and others. Among his books: L’opera racchiusa (2009, Lorenzo Montano Prize); Appunti dal passo del lupo (2013), in the book series curated by Eugenio De Signoribus; Mrogn (2017, Elio Pagliarani Prize); Requiem auf einer Stele (2017); Liner notes for a Pithecanthropus Erectus sketchbook (2018), with a foreword by SJ Fowler; the poetry/concrete catalogue, A private notebook of winds (2019). In 2017 he was awarded the Lorenzo Montano Prize for prose. In 2019 he was awarded the Nassau Review Writer Awards for poetry.
Website: http://federicofederici.net
Blog: http://leserpent.wordpress.com
Augusta Funk lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has work appearing in Best New Poets 2019, The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.
April Goldman-Sims is a poet and pretty fun gal living in Truckee, CA. Recently, she’s been a member of both the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference. Say hi on instagram @aprileli.
Stefania Gomez is a queer writer, audio maker, and teaching artist from Chicago’s South Side. She received her BA from Brown in 2017, and has work in The Offing, the Missouri Review, and Sinking City Review. She is the author of the chapbook ONCE I LOVED A COWBOY (Ghost City Press, 2019) and was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She works at the Poetry Foundation.
Krysten Hill is an educator, writer, and performer. She received her MFA in poetry from UMass Boston where she currently teaches. Her work can be found in apt, The Baltimore Review, B O D Y, The Boiler, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Word Riot, Muzzle, PANK, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award. Her chapbook, How Her Spirit Got Out, received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Clare Collins Hogan is a writer from Maryland. She received her MFA and a Zell Fellowship in poetry from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared with Heavy Feather Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming from the EcoTheo Review and Fugue.
Mackenzie Kozak is a poet living in Asheville, NC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She was a 2018 finalist of the National Poetry Series. Find her online at mackenziekozak.com.
Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. She’s published three chapbooks, the latest, “In The Early Garden With Reason” was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her full manuscript “Small Measures” is forthcoming from Twelve Winters Press. She’s also published short fiction and stories and poems for children.
Lizzie Lawson is a Minnesota-born essayist with publications in The Rumpus, Atticus Review, and others. She is currently an MFA student in creative writing at The Ohio State University.
Kortney Morrow is an emerging writer and editor from Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has been featured in The O, Miami Poetry Festival and MACK by Raptor Editing. She is a Winter Tangerine Workshop alumna, and is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Ohio State University.
Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Mainer/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His poems are forthcoming in New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Believer. Keith has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and Indiana University, where he earned an MFA. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Emily O’Neill writes and tends bar in Cambridge, MA. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican (2015), won YesYes Books’ inaugural Pamet River Prize for women and nonbinary writers, as well as the 2016 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Series in Poetry. Her second collection with YesYes, a falling knife has no handle (2018), was named one of the ten most anticipated poetry titles of fall by Publishers Weekly. She is the author of five chapbooks and her recent work appears in Bennington Review, Catapult, Little Fiction, and Redivider, among others.
Thomas Renjilian is a queer writer originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He received his BA from Vassar College and MFA from Oregon State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, DIAGRAM, Hobart, Thrush, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California, where he is a Dornsife Fellow.
Victoria Ritvo is a Psychology and Neuroscience PhD student at Princeton University, researching memory. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, TYPO, Bat City Review, and Berfrois. She spends her time in Princeton and New York City.
Born in Ireland, Laura O’Gorman Schwartz grew up in Tokyo, Singapore and New Jersey, before returning to live in Singapore in 2012. She graduated from Bard College with a B.A. in Japanese Studies. Currently a columnist for Living in Singapore magazine, her fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in: The Wall Street Journal, Wraparound South, The Shanghai Literary Review, Singapore American Newspaper, Thoughtful Dog and Ruminate Magazine.
Gianna Ward-Vetrano is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her fiction has appeared in Scoundrel Time, THAT Literary Review, and Coffin Bell. She also has a blog, The Unbearable Bookishness of Blogging (www.unbearablebookishness.com), where she has written about literature, cinema, and feminism since 2013. She is the recipient of the Julia Keith Shrout Short Story Prize, awarded by the University of California, Berkeley.