Sean Cho A. is the author of “American Home” (Autumn House 2021) winner of the Autumn House Press chapbook contest. His work can be future found or ignored in Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Nashville Review, among others. Sean is a graduate of the MFA program at The University of California Irvine and a PhD Student at the University of Cincinnati. He is the Editor in Chief of The Account.
Cynthia Amoah is a spoken word poet, educator, and mentor originally from Ghana. She completed her MFA at The New School where she was cited for Excellence in Poetry and has been featured on the stages of TEDxDrewUniversity, TEDxOhioStateUniversity, and the United Nations Information Center in Accra, among many. Cynthia’s writing and performances often concern the foraging questions that have to do with identity and belonging, with displacement, migration and uprootedness. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in OURS Magazine, Nimrod Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets Chapbooks by Akashic Books. Cynthia currently resides in Columbus, OH with her family where she facilitates workshops in poetry, positive-thinking, confidence-building, and the power of using our voice.
Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is now a PhD candidate and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, a second chapbook, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, and her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in Spring of 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.
A Pushcart Prize-winning Black author, AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Salamander, The Florida Review, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, The Sun Magazine, Puerto Del Sol, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. A six-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award, he is originally from the Bronx, NY and now lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he advocates for the relationship between mental health and bodybuilding. He can be found on Instagram @the_fit_poet.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, 2019 winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and Haint, winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the 2022 recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council statewide individual artist award, the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize, a Cave Canem fellow, and the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series Curator and Poetry Programs manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
James “dirtkics” Dickerson is a photographer who has documented Toledo, Ohio since the late 2010’s. His work emerges through the language of a neighborhood with a focus on Black and Brown communities alike.
Dionne Custer Edwards is a writer, educator, and the Director of Learning & Public Practice at the Wexner Center for the Arts. She also founded the award-winning art and writing program Pages. Dionne has published critical and literary writing, internationally and nationally in Sanat Dünyamiz (“Our Art World”), Turkey; Journal GEARTE, Brazil; and in the University of Arizona’s Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Her literary work has appeared in 3Elements Review, Barren Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Flock, Gordon Square Review, Grist, Porter House Review, Storm Cellar, The Seventh Wave, Tahoma Literary Review, and others. Dionne is co-editor of a book series, forthcoming, to be published by Ohio State University Press, On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities.
Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland Ohio, where she is the current Lake Erie Siren & a teaching artist for Center For Arts Inspired Learning and The Westside Community Sisterhood Project in conjunction with the Anisfieldwolf Foundation. She is a 2022 Catapult fellow with Cleveland Public Theater. In 2021 she filmed a commercial for the Cleveland Museum of Art & participated with #teamyellowbrickroad for the Black Joy Experience. She is a 2021 Premier Playwright fellow recipient with Cleveland Public theater. She is a 2020 WateringHole Manuscript fellow, a 2018 winter tangerine chapbook fellow and a 2018 Poetry Foundation incubator fellow. Her work appears in, The Offing, BOAAT, Tinderbox, Josephine Quarterly and elsewhere. She has toured both nationally and internationally. She is the co-founder of Outsiders Queer Midwest Writers Retreat. A two time pushcart prize nominee, chances are she’s by a lake, thinking about Toni Morrison and talking to ghosts. In her spare time she is growing her afro so tall God can use it for a microphone and speak through her. Her first full length manuscript, Urbanshee is available for pre-order with Button Poetry.
Currently a student in Miami University’s MFA program, K Anand Gall also holds an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is currently working on a creative nonfiction project in which she explores the connections between adoption and health. A recent finalist in The Arkansas International C.D. Wright Emerging Poet’s Prize, K’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in several anthologies, including the award-winning anthology, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, as well as Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Flat Water Stirs, Bared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts, and Riparian. Find her on twitter @kanandgall.
A writer from Ohio, Geramee Hensley currently lives elsewhere. They edit Sonora Review and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Their work has been featured in Button Poetry, Indiana Review, The Lantern Review, The Recluse, The Margins, decomp, and more. You can find them at geramee.com.
Manuel Iris (Mexico, 1983). Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio (2018-2020). He received the “Merida” National award of poetry (Mexico, 2009) for his book Notebook of dreams, and the Rodulfo Figueroa Regional award of poetry for his book The disguises of fire (Mexico, 2014).
In 2016 two different anthologies of his poetic work were published: The naked light, in Venezuela; and Before the mystery, in El Salvador. His first bilingual anthology of poems, Traducir el silencio/Translating silence, was published in New York in 2018. This book won two different awards in the International Latino Book Awards in Los Angeles, California, in that same year.
Iris has published poetry, essay and translation in magazines and literary journals from Mexico, Spain, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Portugal, France, the United States, and Angola. His poetry has been included in several Mexican, as well as Latin-American, and American, poetry anthologies. He has also given talks, lectures and poetry readings in literary events, academic conferences and cultural centers of Mexico, the United States and Europe. In 2021, he became a member of the prestigious System of Art Creators of Mexico (Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte).
Manuel Iris holds a BA in Latin American Literature from the Autonomous University of the Yucatan (Mexico), a MA in Spanish from the New Mexico State University, and a PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Cincinnati, the city in which he lives.
Annie Johnson is an emerging teen writer from the Columbus area, and a member of The Adroit Journal’s 2022 Summer Mentorship class. Annie’s work has been published in The New York Times, Teen Ink Magazine, Flip The Page, the Power of the Pen Winners Book, as well as recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (2021 and 2022), YoungArts and the Interlochen Virginia B. Ball scholarship.
Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term), Kamara is the author of A Brief Biography of My Name (African Poetry Book Fund/Alashic Books, 2018) and When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017) and the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration (The Hawkins Project, 2022). She earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. For more: www.yaylala.com
Amit Majmudar is an internationally published poet, novelist, translator, and essayist, as well as the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. His forthcoming volumes in the United States include Twin A: A Memoir and Black Avatar and Other Essays. A three-volume retelling of the Mahabharata is forthcoming in India. His most recent poetry collection is What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020), and he is currently co-creating a graphic novel, The Mustang Sutra. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children.
Jyotsna Sreenivasan is the author of the short story and novella collection These Americans and the novel And Laughter Fell From the Sky. Both are about Indian Americans, and both include Ohio settings. She received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for 2022, and was selected as a Fiction Fellow for the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies (including Copper Nickel and Sixfold). She was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She was born and raised in northeast Ohio. Her parents are immigrants from India. She works as a secondary school English teacher in Columbus, Ohio. For information about Jyotsna as well as other writers who are children of immigrants, please see www.SecondGenStories.com.
Dennis James Sweeney is the author of In the Antarctic Circle (Autumn House Press, 2021). His writing has appeared in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, The New York Times, and The Southern Review, among others. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Khaty Xiong is a Hmong American poet from Fresno, California. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), and three poetry chapbooks: Ode to the Far Shore (Platypus Press, 2016), Deer Hour (New Michigan Press, 2014), and Elegies (University of Montana, 2013). Her work has been featured in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Xiong’s honors include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, residencies at MacDowell, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council. Currently, she is working on her second poetry collection, a series of pastoral elegies detailing her grief over the sudden loss of her mother.
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (2022), I Always Carry My Bones, Iowa Poetry Prize winner (2021), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (2017). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review,American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Guernica,Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.