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We at Aster(ix) are grateful to all our contributing writers.
Angie Cruz is a novelist based in Pittsburgh. She is the co-founder and editor of Aster(ix) Journal.
Adriana E. Ramírez is an award-winning nonfiction writer and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She is the co-founder and publisher of Aster(ix) Journal. More information online at aeramirez.com
Isabel Acevedo is a Puerto Rican poet now residing in Milledgeville, Georgia where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Santa Ana River Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Tule Review. She also serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Arts & Letters.
Allison Adrian is an ethnomusicologist, particularly interested in the relationships between music and community building. She is currently Assistant Professor of Music, Women's Studies and Critical Studies of Race & Ethnicity at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN. She was recently awarded a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellowship to study indigenous music in Southern Ecuador. She is co-editing Voicing Girlhood in Popular Culture: Music, Performance, Activism with Jacqueline Warwick, a critical anthology to be published in the Routledge Series in Popular Music.
Daniel Alarcón hails from Lima, Peru. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.
Rosa Alcalá was born in Paterson, New Jersey, to Spanish immigrants.
Alcalá is the author of three books of poetry: Undocumentaries and The
Lust of Unsentimental Waters, both from Shearsman Books (2010 &
2011), and M(y)Other Tongue (forthcoming 2017, Futurepoem Books),
and is the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship. Spit Temple:
The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse,
2012), which she edited, was runner-up for a PEN Award for Poetry
in Translation. She lives in El Paso, Texas, where she teaches in the
Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the
University of Texas–El Paso.
Gessy Alvarez is founder and editor of the web journal, Digging Through The Fat. She shares her love of art and culture as well as some of her offbeat observations on her podcast, Digging Through with Gessy Alvarez. She writes stories, poems, and essays about the middle of things.Her prose has appeared in Lunch Ticket, APT: Aforementioned Productions, Volume One Brooklyn, Entropy, Drunk Monkeys, Literary Orphans, and other publications.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God's One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press 2014). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Lee is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle. Currently, she lives in San Diego and serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University.
Kianny N. Antigua She was born in the Dominican Republic in 1979, and lives in New Hampshire, where she works as Spanish Lecturer at Dartmouth College and directs the Spanish Playgroup for children at Howe Library. She has published: Mía, Esteban y las nuevas palabras / Mía, Esteban and the New Words (Children's Lit., Alfaguara 2014), El tragaluz del sótano (Short Story, Artepoética Press 2014), Cuando el resto se apaga (Poetry, Proyecto Zompopos 2013), 9 Iris y otros malditos cuentos (Fiction, Editora Nacional 2010), & El expreso (Short Story, Argos 2004.) Her work also appears in several anthologies, textbooks, magazines and other media outlets. «Down- town», one of her short stories, won the Second Prize in Premio de Cuento Juan Bosch, Funglode 2011, and seven other short stories have won honorary mentions in this and other literary contests. Some of her stories have been translated into Italian, French and English.
A CantoMundo fellow, José Angel Araguz has had poems recently in Huizache and Salamander. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Author of six chapbooks and the collection Everything We Think We Hear, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence.
Radhiyah Ayobami - is Brooklyn-born with Southern roots. She holds a B.A in Africana Studies from Brooklyn College, a MFA in Prose from Mills College, and has received awards from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Currently, she lives with her teenage son in Oakland, California, where she is at work on her first novel and the trees give her poems.
Catalina Bartlett is a PhD Candidate in English at Texas A&M University. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University. Beneath the Shadow of the Red Rock is her first novel.
A native of south Minneapolis, Michelle Be (Michelle Barnes) is a spoken word poet, visual artist, theater artist, and DJ. She uses her work to dive into many levels of introspection in order to reconfigure, heal, and progress. With a background in psychology, Michelle aims to bridge science and spirituality through her art: "I am most interested in connecting with audiences on a cerebral level. This allows me to remain authentic in expressing that which forms in my creative state of mind." Michelle has performed her spoken word poetry at Pillsbury House+Theatre, Bedlam Theater, Intermedia Arts and Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis, MN. She is a multi-disciplinary teaching artist, specializing in youth arts programming, and is an artistic director for RARE Productions, an organization supporting queer artists of color.
Yvette Benavides is a professor of English at Our Lady of the Lake University. She serves on the advisory and programming committees for the San Antonio Book Festival and is a book critic for the San Antonio Express News. She is a commentator for "Fronteras" and "Texas Matters" on Texas Public Radio. Her work has been published in a number of publications including, Latina, The Pedagogy of Pop, The Rivard Report, The Texas Observer, The Americas Review. Her short fiction has been published in Huizache magazine, the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and the Belleview Literary Review.
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from
Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University
of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. Her debut novel, The Mothers, was released in 2016.
Champa Bilwakesh was born in India, earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, Monsoon Magazine, Sugar Mule, and India Current where it won prizes in the Katha contest. Her story "The Boston Globe Personal Line" was nominated for the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, received honorable mention in the 2007 edition of Pushcart Prize, and has been translated into Italian for the online magazine, El-Ghibli. She lives in Andover, MA, where she produces TV shows for the community channel.
The River's Song is Jacqueline Bishop's first novel. She is also the author of two collections of poems, Fauna and Snapshots from Istanbul. Her non-fiction books are My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York and Writers Who Paint/Painters Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists. An accomplished visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, USA and Italy, Ms. Bishop was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow to Morocco; the 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow; and is a full time Master Teacher in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University.
Amy Elizabeth Bishop is a recent graduate of the State University of New
York, Geneseo. She currently works as an assistant at Dystel & Goderich
Literary Management in NYC and reads for *Wyvern Lit *and *The Rumpus*. Her poetry has or will appear in *Gandy Dancer*, *The Susquehanna Review,* and *Dialogist*. You can find her on Twitter at @givealittlelove.
Born in Nairobi to black and white parents, and brought up as an expatriate in the Middle East, Boswell combines traditional draftswomanship and digital technology to create drawings, animations and installations. Boswell was nominated/shortlisted for the Art Foundation's Animation Fellowship 2012, was the first recipient of the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, which she used to produce her immersive installation The Matter of Memory, which she first showed alongside John Akomfrah and Rashaad Newsome at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London in 2014. She participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2015 and the Biennial of Moving Images 2016 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, and has exhibited at Art15, 1:54 London and New York, and galleries including Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, The Fine Art Society, and New Art Exchange. Dear Mr Shakespeare, her Guardian / British Council commissioned short film collaboration with filmmaker Shola Amoo (in which she wrote, performed, and animated) was nominated for Best International Short at Sundance 2017, she is currently one of the artists-in-residence at Somerset House Studios, and her solo show For Every Real Word Spoken opened recently at Tiwani Gallery, London. Boswell was also the Special Prize Winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2017, and as such will exhibits in Venice during Summer 2017.
Rachel Ann Brickner is a writer from Pittsburgh. In a previous life, she lived and worked in New York City and San Francisco, editing political science and science textbooks. Her fiction has previously appeared in PANK, Corium Magazine, and Burrow Press Review. She's currently at work on a collection of short stories and is accepting that she really truly loves to draw.
Ariana Brown is an Afromexicana poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2014 collegiate national poetry slam champion. An alum of Brave New Voices, Ariana's work has been featured in PBS, Huffington Post, Blavity, For Harriet, and Remezcla. Ariana, who has been dubbed a "part-time curandera" has performed across the U.S. at venues such as the San Antonio Guadalupe Theater, University of California - Santa Cruz, Tucson Poetry Festival, and the San Francisco Opera Theatre. When she is not onstage, she is probably eating an avocado, listening to the Kumbia Kings, or validating black girl rage in all its miraculous
forms. Her work is published or forthcoming in Nepantla, Huizache, Rattle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets from Arte Público Press. She is currently earning an MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh.
Find more of her work at www.arianabrown.com and on social media @arianathepoet.
Ugandan Brian Bwesigye studied Law at Makerere University and was until recently an LLM (Human Rights) student at Central European University- Budapest. He is co-founder of the Centre for African Cultural Excellence (CACE), which seeks to harness the abilities of African writers and artists in using culturally-grounded narratives to bring social change.
Glendaliz Camacho is a 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee, 2014 Jentel Foundation Artist in Residence, and 2015 Caldera Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson, and Hedgebrook Artist in Residence. She is a 2015 Write A House finalist. Glendaliz is a proud Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) alum. Her work appears in Soulmate 101 and Other True Stories of Love (Full Grown People); All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press); The Butter; Saraba Magazine; and Kweli Journal, among others. She has work forthcoming in The Female Complaint (Shade Mountain Press, 2015). Glendaliz is currently working on a short story collection and novel.
Dr. Norma Cantú has published articles on a number or academic subjects as well as poetry and fiction. Her publications on border literature, the teaching of English, quinceañera celebration and the matachines, a religious dance tradition have earned her an international reputation as a scholar and folklorist. She has co-edited four books and edited a collection of testimonios by Chicana scientists, mathematicians and engineers. Her award winning Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera chronicles her childhood experiences on the border. She edits the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Culture and Traditions book series at The Texas A&M University Press. As Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and English at UMKC, Cantu's duties include teaching, committee work, and the development of the Latina and Latino Studies (LLS) Program.
Abigail Carl-Klassen's work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Guernica, Huizache, and Post Road, among others, and is anthologized in New Border Voices (Texas A&M University Press) Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance (Texas Review Press) and Outrage: A Protest Anthology for Injustice in a 9/11 World (Slough Press). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2015. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas El Paso's Bilingual Creative Writing Program and taught at El Paso Community College and the University of Texas El Paso. Before becoming a college instructor she worked in community development and in the El Paso public schools.
Christopher Carmona was the inaugural writer-in-residence for the Langdon Review Writers Residency Program in 2015. His story, ³Strange Leaves,² was the third finalist in the Texas Observer Short Story Contest of 2014. He was also a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2013. He has been published in numerous journals and magazines including Trickster Literary Journal, Interstice, vandal., Bordersenses, & the Sagebrush Review. His first collection of short stories entitled, The Road to Llorona Park was published by Stephen F. Austin University Press in 2016. He has recently edited an anthology called Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World for Slough Press and was a co-editor for The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writing. He was also co-author for a scholarly conversation book entitled Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Identities and he has two collections of poetry: beat and I Have Always Been Here. Finally, he is the Artistic Director of the Coalition of New Chican@ Artists.
Amy Sara Carroll is the author of two collections of poetry SECESSION (Hyperbole Books, an imprint of SDSU Press, 2012) and FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (Fordham UP, 2013), chosen by Claudia Rankine for the 2012 Poets Out Loud Prize. Since 2008, she has been a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which was included in the 2010 California Biennial. With EDT 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab and the University of Michigan interdisciplinary workshop the Border Collective, she collaboratively authored [({ })] The Desert Survival Series/La serie de sobrevivencia del desierto (The Office of Net Assessment/ University of Michigan Digital Environments Cluster Publishing Series, 2014), that digitally has been redistributed by CTheory Books (2015), the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 3 (2016), CONACULTA E-Literatura/Centro de Cultura Digital (2016), and HemiPress (2017). In 2015, Carroll served as the University of Mississippi Summer Poet in Residence. Summer 2010 and every summer thereafter, she has participated in Mexico City's alternative arts space SOMA. Carroll's critical monograph REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press under the auspices of their Mellon Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Cultures Publishing Initiative. Currently, she is a 2017-2018 Society Fellow in Cornell University's Society for the Humanities.
Nívea Castro, J.D., is the curator of Sinister Wisdom; Out Latina Lesbians, published July 2015. A Nuyorican lesbiana activist, Nívea is also a writer, photographer, social justice attorney, martial artist, and educator. A Marge Percy Poetry Workshop participant and a VONA alum, her poems and writings have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Word, a Cave Canem chapbook, And Then, Kalyani, Best of Panic, and Stand our Ground. She has appeared and been featured in various venues, including NYC and Brooklyn Lit Crawl, Listen to Your Mother, a national series of live readings by local writers, Crack the Mic, Camaradas, Soul Sister Revue, BAAD!ASS Women Festival, La Pluma y Tinta, New Voices Reading Series, Canvas of Words, and Michfest. She is a member of the New York City Latinas Writers Group. Nívea lives in Brooklyn and is completing a poetry manuscript and an essay/photo chapbook on her recent travels to Cuba. She is working on her upcoming book, Coquito Man. You may read her work and view her photography at www.niveacastro.com. Reach her on Facebook or by email at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian writer who was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and raised in Quebec City, Canada. She is currently a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
Fiona Cheong is the author of THE SCENT OF THE GODS (W.W. Norton, 1991) and SHADOW THEATRE (Soho, 2002). Her shorter work can be found in CHARLIE CHAN IS DEAD: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE and TILTING THE CONTINENT: SOUTHEAST ASIAN AMERICAN WRITING. A native of Singapore, she presently teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.
Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut and currently
based in New York. Her book of poetry, The Paper Camera, is
forthcoming from Litmus Press. She is the founding editor of Eleven
Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in
publications such as Guernica, Prairie Schooner and the MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies. She has exhibited widely, including in the
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and The Drawing Center, and participated
in the Performa Biennial 11, Jerusalem Show IV, and the 1st Brooklyn
Biennial. She is the co-founder of the Mutating Cities Institute and
Associate Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies Department
at the Pratt Institute.
Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The
Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), a chapbook, Petite
Manifesto (Vagabond, 2014), and a pamphlet, Freely Frayed (Wave
Pamphlet #9). She has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary
Fellowship, and the Lucien Stryk Translation Prize.
Caitlyn Christensen is Associate Editor for Sampsonia Way. She studied Writing and History at the University of Pittsburgh. Caitlyn began working with Sampsonia Way in 2011 as an editorial intern, and joined the magazine's staff in 2014.
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist poet, conceptual and performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. In summer 2014 she premiered "_____ is the thing with feathers" and reprised "Say My Name" (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls) at "Call & Response," an innovative two-part festival of black women and performance that she organized at Antioch College. Other recent work includes: "Fugue (Da, Montréal)" at the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro in Montreal, Canada (June 2014); "Aide-mémoire," at the AFiRiperFOMA Biennial in Harare, Zimbabwe (Nov. 2013); and a restaging of John Cage's "How to Get Started." Gabrielle is currently circulating Swallow the Fish, her critical/creative text on black feminist performance art practice. She is Associate Professor of Performance at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Shaveonne Clarke writes: I'm a writer/editor and digital strategist living in the D.C. area. In 2013 I graduated from Purdue University's MFA program in creative writing, where I spent two years as the nonfiction editor of Sycamore Review. My fiction has appeared in Aster(ix) Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, Hayden's Ferry Review and Kenyon Review Online.
JoAnna Commandaros is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she currently lives and works. Her drawings, sculptures, and installations are inspired by alchemy, cultural aesthetics, and ecological systems. Her work are reflective of her Greek and Syrian roots. She has participated in residencies and exhibitions nationally and internationally. For more information, visit her website.
Francine Conley is a poet, performer, and director. She has a chapbook of poems, How Dumb the Stars, through Parallel Press, and was a founding and active member of Franco-American touring theatre company, Le Theatre de la Chandelle Verte 2001-2014. Over the years she's written, produced and performed 8 one-woman shows in English. Her current one-woman multimedia show, The Narrow Road (2015), is the fruit of a year she spent traveling and taking video footage throughout the UK in 2011-2012. The show was designed after Matsuo Basho's 17th book, In Narrow Road to the Deep North, where as a poet he saw journey as a great metaphor: Travel is life. Life is travel. There's no end to travel; you die on the road, you're born on the road. Otherwise, her manuscript of poems, Blue Mother, is in circulation. Her website, http://francineconley.com will have up-to-date info.
S. Brook Corfman is a poet who writes plays, living in a turret in Pittsburgh. This Lambda Literary Fellow's work has appeared in Washington Square, The Journal, Prelude, Ghost Proposal, and OmniVerse, among other places. @sbrookcorfman
Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street, a novel about gentrification, family, and memory, set in Brooklyn, New York (Little A 2017). She is a graduate of the Columbia University MFA program and also holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from Yale University and Fordham University. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Arts & Letters, Kweli, The Rumpus, Guernica, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among other places. Naima has taught writing in a range of settings, from prison to after-school programs, summer camps, and universities. She tweets about literature, culture, and justice as @zafatista.
Kim Dana Kupperman is the author of the essay collection, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence, and, forthcoming in November 2016, The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir. She is the founding editor of Welcome Table Press, a nonprofit independent press devoted to publishing and celebrating the essay. She is a guest faculty member at West Virginia Wesleyan's low-residency MFA Program and teaches in Johns Hopkins University's MA in Writing Program.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Create Dangerously , and Claire of the Sea Light . She is also the editor of The Butterfly ' s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2. She has written five books for young adults and children, Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou , and Mama's Nightingale, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir , Brother, I ' m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur fellow. Her most recent books is Untwine, a young adult novel.
image: Lynn Savarese
Alexandria Delcourt received her MFA from the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program in 2014. She is currently a Lecturer in the Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her work has been used in dance performances, read and taught internationally, and has appeared in Written River, Poetry Quarterly, As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, Kalyani Magazine, FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, and other publications. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Saudamini Deo is a writer and photographer from India.
Dowoti Desír is a human rights activist, scholar, and photographer. She is monitor of memorials, monuments and historic sites of the Maafa/Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Cynthia Dewi Oka is a poet and author of Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). A Pushcart Prize Nominee, her poems have appeared online and in print, including in Guernica, Black Renaissance Noire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Dusie, The Wide Shore, The Collapsar, Apogee, Kweli, As Us Journal, Obsidian, and Terrain.org. She is also a contributor the anthologies Read Women (Locked Horn Press, 2014), Dismantle (Thread Makes Blanket, 2014), and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (PM Press, 2016). Cynthia has been awarded the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor's Prize in Poetry, scholarships from the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) Writing Workshop and Vermont Studio Center, and the Art and Change Grant from Leeway Foundation. An immigrant from Bali, Indonesia, she is now based in South Jersey/Philly. Her second poetry collection is forthcoming in 2017 from Northwestern University Press.
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cherokee poet, scholar, and activist Qwo-Li Driskill was raised in rural Colorado. Driskill earned a PhD from Michigan State University. Driskill's poetry engages themes of inheritance and healing, and is rooted in personal Cherokee Two-Spirit, queer, and mixed-race experience. Walking with Ghosts (2005), Driskill's first poetry collection, was named Book of the Month by Sable: The LitMag for New Writing and was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Driskill co-edited, with Colin Kennedy Donovan, Scars Tell Stories: A Queer and Trans (Dis)ability Zine (2007), and has work featured in several anthologies, including Beyond Masculinity: Essays by Queer Men on Gender and Politics (2008, edited by Trevor Hoppe) and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (2003, edited by Janice Gould and Dean Rader). The poet is the founder of Dragonfly Rising Press.
Aisha Durham is a cultural studies scholar. Durham uses auto/ethnography, performance writing, and intersectional approaches honed in Black feminist cultural criticism to analyze representations of Black womanhood in hip hop media. Recent work on Black womanhood is featured in her new book, Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture. This book extends earlier discussions about hip hop culture, media representations, and the body in her co-edited volumes, Home Girls Make Some!: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method & Policy. Durham's cultural criticism has been featured in popular news media and sites, such as The New Yorker, Haaretz, Crunk Feminist Collective, NewBlackMan, and Ms. Magazine.
South Texas native Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of All the Agents & Saints: Dispatches from the US Borderlands; Mexican Enough; Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, VQR, Believer, and Oxford American and edited Best Women's Travel Writing 2010. Her coverage of the borderlands won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at UNC-Chapel Hill and can be found at www.StephanieElizondoGriest.com and @SElizondoGriest.
Patricia Engel is the author of the acclaimed books, Vida and It's Not Love, It's Just Paris. Her new novel, The Veins of the Ocean, is forthcoming from Grove Press in 2016.
Chicana born and raised on the border between Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua
Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Earned PhD in English with an emphasis on
Cultural Rhetorics and Literatures of Color from Texas A&M University in 2012. Currently teaches courses in Composition, Cultural Rhetorics, Technical Writing, and Business & Professional Writing. Publications include, "The Calmécac Collective, or, How to Survive the Academic Industrial Complex through Radical Indigenous Practice." El Mundo Zurdo 3: Selected Works from the Meetings of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa. Eds. Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Larissa Mercado-López,
Antonia Castañeda. San Francisco: Aunt Lute (2013).
Araceli Esparza writes bilingual-bicultural picture books in between
parenting, teaching and saving words for later. Follow her @WI_MUJER for
diverse literature news and bookish things.
Writer and filmmaker Dia Felix is author of the Lambda-nominated experimental novel "Nochita," published on City Lights/Sister Spit in 2014. Areas of interest include romance, celebrity, obsession, decadence, modernity, and rock and roll. She's screened films and read at very many places including Segue, Radar Reading Series, The New Museum, and Albertine Books. She's published recently with Ping Pong, a journal of the Henry Miller Library, The Feminist Wire, and Poetry Project Newsletter. She curates a pan-genre literary performance series, GUTS, at Dixon Place and founded and heads the maybe-fictional enterprise Personality Press. She's from California and lives in East Harlem, New York.
Sujatha Fernandes is the author of several books, including a memoir about global hip hop, "Close to the Edge" (Verso, 2011) and the forthcoming "Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling" (Oxford, 2017). Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, American Prospect, and a Harper Collins anthology, among other places. Sujatha is a sociology professor at the University of Sydney and the City University of New York. She is an editorial board member of Transition magazine. Sujatha is currently working on a book of interlinked short stories entitled Shadow People. She tweets at @SujathaTF.
Armando García is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He is completing his first book, Impossible Indians: The Native Subjects of Decolonial Performance, a study of theatre, performance and the consolidation of race from the colony to the present.
Lorgia García-Peña is an assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures and of history and literature at Harvard.
Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy and the The Loss of All Lost Things. At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Award, The First Horizon Award, and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction Award. Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the International Latino Book Award, the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President's Book Award, a National Silver Medal IPPY Award and was a Finalist for the William Saroyan Prize. Her newest collection The Loss of All Lost Things was awarded the Elixir Prize in Fiction, The Chicago Public Library Foundation's 21st Century Award, the Royal Palm Literary Award, the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President's Book Award, was a Finalist for the Paterson Prize, and is a Finalist for an IndieFab Award. Ninety-five of Gautier's stories have been published, appearing in Agni, Best African American Fiction, Callaloo, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New Stories from the South, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and StoryQuarterly among other places. Her fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Callaloo, The Camargo Foundatio, the Château de Lavigny, Dora Maar, Disquiet International, Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers; Hurston/Wright Foundation, Kimbilio, MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, Sewanee Writer's Conference, Ucross Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center.
Mine Gencel Bek is a professor at the Department of Journalism, Faculty of Communication, Ankara University. She completed her Ph.D. at Loughborough University in 1999 with the thesis Communicating Capitalism: A Study of the Contemporary Turkish Press. This analysis included the structural elements of the changing industry, news as texts, and the role of journalists in the news-production process. For that thesis, she conducted interviews with journalists and editors and investigated the news production process. Her publications have a wide range of issues: the political economy of Turkish media; the media policies in the European Union and Turkey; media professionals and textual analysis of news in press and TV on the issues such as tabloidization and representation of women and children. Common to all of her work is criticism of unethical practices of irresponsible media and the call for the democratization of societies for freedom and equality, and the democratization of the media, with a special focus on journalism. Her current research is on the comparative media systems, journalism practices, and technological innovations.
Oscar Darío Gómez writes short, short stories and works as a publicist in Medellín, Colombia.
Estella Gonzalez was born and raised in East Los Angeles, which inspires most of her writing. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol and Huizache and has been anthologized in Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature published by Bilingual Press. She received a "Special Mention" in The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: Best of the Small Presses 2014 Edition and was selected a "Reading Notable" for The Best American Non-Required Reading 2011. Currently, she serves as a contributing editor for Kweli Journal.
Carolina González is a recovering journalist and academic who keeps wanting to get back to the dissolute bohemian life she imagined for herself after she saw Jean-Jacques Beineix's film Diva in 1981. With Seth Kugel, she co-wrote the guidebook Nueva York: The Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs (St. Martin's Press, 2006). She never quite lost the 20 pounds she gained tasting street tamales and Cuban sandwiches for the book. Currently, she works in communications for the union SEIU Local 32BJ, and continues to work independently on storytelling and radio projects. "Tía Milena/Milena Tía" was originally written in 2007. Milena is now nine years old.
Joshua Graber is a Pittsburgh-based writer, translator, and educator. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The New Guard Review's BANG!, and Map Literary. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.
Arielle Greenberg's newest books are the poetry collection Slice and the creative nonfiction work Locally Made Panties. She is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic, and co-editor of three anthologies, including the forthcoming Electric Gurlesque, co-edited with Becca Klaver. Arielle writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review, edits the series (K)ink: Writing While Deviant for The Rumpus, and lives in Maine. She teaches in the community and in Oregon State University-Cascades' MFA.
Andrée Greene is a graduate of Cornell (BA) and Columbia (MFA, fiction)
Universities. She lives in New York City where she teaches creative
writing, is a freelance editor, and recently completed her novel, *Nobody's
is a poet and photographer. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. A Cave Canem and Kimbilio Fellow, she is the recipient of fellowships including Yaddo, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Millay Colony, and others. In 2011, Griffiths appeared in the first-ever poetry issue in Oprah's O Magazine.
She is widely known for her literary portraits, fine art photography, and lyric videos. Griffiths recently completed her first extensive video project, P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), an intimate series of micro-interviews, which gathers nearly 100 contemporary poets in conversation, is featured online at the Academy of American Poets' website.
Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia, The Requited Distance, and Mule & Pear. Her most recent full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry.
Currently, Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, a prayer poet priestess and has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Alexis is a founder of Brilliance Remastered, a service to help visionary underrepresented graduate students stay connected to purpose, passion and community, co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, a national experiential archive amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ Brilliance, and the community school Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind. Alexis was named one of UTNE Reader's 50 Visionaries Transforming the World in 2009, was awarded a Too Sexy for 501-C3 trophy in 2011 and is one of the Advocate's top 40 under 40 features in 2012.
Cathy Guo is a student and writer working on her first chapbook
project funded by Columbia University, which aims to present oral history
and poetry together in a dialogue on memory, landscape and diaspora in
modern Chinese history.
Katie Gutierrez believes that a well-told story can transcend what a reader "knows" to be real about the world—and thus change the world for that reader. With a BA in English and philosophy from Southwestern University, and an MFA in fiction from Texas State University, she has edited more than 50 fiction and non-fiction books by emerging and established writers.
Katie counts herself blessed to have learned under such writers as Tim O'Brien, Tom Grimes, Debra Monroe, Nelly Rosario, and ZZ Packer, among others. She has co-written numerous books with RTC, including"#JUMP", with Corey Blake and Annie Hart, and four books in the ORP Library including "Meltdown" and the companion comic "Melting Down", and "An Unlikely Trust" and the comic "Alina's Story", all with Dr. Jeff Krukar and James G. Balestrieri. Katie has contributed to or been profiled in People, Hispanic Executive magazine, Entrepreneur magazine, Community Impact Newspaper, Narrative magazine, and more.
She can't believe she's lucky enough to do what she loves every day.
Daisy Hernández is the author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. She has written for The Atlantic, ColorLines, The New York Times, and NPR's All Things Considered and CodeSwitch, and her essays have appeared in the Bellingham Review, Dogwood, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, and Hunger Mountain. She teaches creative writing at Miami University in Ohio.
Leticia Hernández-Linares is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and educator, and the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl (Tía Chucha Press, 2015). Widely published, her work appears in newspapers, literary journals, and anthologies, some of which include: U.S. Latino Literature Today, Street Art San Francisco, Pilgrimage, Huizache, and This Bridge We Call Home. She has performed her poemsongs throughout the country and in El Salvador. Active in Central American Art and Literature, she participated in the 2014 Encuentro Poético: Salvadoran-American Poets at the Smithsonian. She is the founder of an artist collaborative, Amate: Women Painting Stories, and a CantoMundo alumna and organizing committee member. A three-time San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist grantee, she lives, works, and writes in the Mission District, San Francisco—20 years strong. Visit her: joinleticia.com
Lucia Hierro is an artist. She writes: My work explores the body as index(ical) i.e: (clothing, speech variety, table manners). I address these ideas across a broad platform of techniques that includes digital media, collage, and felt painting constructions.
My status as a bi-lingual female artist requires that I work across multiple media in much the same way I work across gender and culture on a daily basis.
Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe says: "I am a poet, filmmaker, performer, loving mother, 85 auntie and daughter. My work is about ancestors, spirit, politics, contradictions, humor, confronting white supremacy and always about healing. My recent work includes the collection of poetry Fierce Shimmer- Poems for Mama, the film Thought Woman- The Life and Ideas of Paula Gunn Allen, and organizing "A Place at the Table (We Have Always Been at the Table)," an installation exhibition with film screening and performance at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. This March 2015 event celebrates women as leaders, creators and thinkers transforming our worlds. http://www.fierceshimmer.com/
Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a short story collection. Her stories, essays and comics have appeared in The Florida Review, American Short Fiction, the New York Times and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at www.aubreyhirsch.com and follow her on Twitter @aubreyhirsch.
H. N. Holder was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author of the short stories You can Always Tell; Keepsake; The Iridescent Blue-Black Boy with Wings, which won the 2nd prize in the 2011 Small Axe Journal Literary Contest; and Love Story No. 8: Jane and Phillip, a finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Sarah Hollows is an interdisciplinary artist focusing particularly on performance, relational and social practice. She is interested in both destroying white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and investigating the invisible element that exists/is activated/comes to life once a relationship is initiated or a gesture is received. Recent work includes "HOLDING ON/LETTING GO" and "Settlements," both artistic collaborations with Kris Mason, and "Off the Menu" (not of the menu) an on-going relational experiment imagining and practicing an economy of kindness. Sarah is a graduate student in Intermedia at the University of Maine (Orono) where she also co-runs "Hide and Seek," a collaboratively run coffee shop/ experimental art station on campus.
bell hooks, noted cultural critic, commentator, and feminist, is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she has chosen the lower case pen name bell hooks, based on the names of her mother and grandmother, to emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is. She is the author of over thirty books, many of which have focused on issues of social class, race, and gender. In 2013, she published the award-winning poetry collection Appalachian Elegy and Writing Beyond Race.
Didi Jackson's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, The Common, Café Review, and Passages North among other publications. Her chapbook, Slag and Fortune, was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly. She divides her time between Florida and Vermont teaching humanities at the University of Central Florida and Poetry and the Visual Arts at the University of Vermont.
A native of Tennessee, Raven Jackson is a poet and filmmaker currently attending New York University's Graduate Film Program. A Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the New School's Writing Program, her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, CALYX, Kweli, Phantom Limb, PANK, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, little violences, is forthcoming from Cutbank Literary Magazine in early 2017. She's currently in production on her fifth short film, Nettles.
Joe Jiménez is the author of The Possibilities of Mud (Korima 2014) and Bloodline (Arte Público 2016). Jiménez is the recipient of the 2016 Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Press Poetry Prize. Jimenez's essays and poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Iron Horse, RHINO, Bat City, and Waxwing, and on the PBS NewsHour and Lambda Literary sites. Jimenez was recently awarded a Lucas Artists Literary Artists Fellowship from 2017-2020. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is a member of the Macondo Writing Workshops. For more information, visit joejimenez.net
Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson is an Assistant Professor of African & Afro-American and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Currently, Johnson is completing her manuscript, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora, while in residence as a Newhouse Center for the Humanities Fellow at Wellesley College. She writes about dance, black feminism and diaspora.
Hope Johnson is a native of Lexington, KY. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University and BA in English from the University of Kentucky. Among many, Johnson's poetry has been published in Loose Change Magazine and Pluck Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture. Her academic work on Creative and Culturally Responsive Instruction can be found in Charter Schools: Voices from the Field. Johnson now lives in New York City, where she continues her research and work-life striving to integrate creative writing and fine arts programs into underserved schools with the NYC Department of Education.
Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela's writing has been recognized by The Leeway Foundation, Hedgebrook and others. Her work has been published in Make/shift, The Rust Belt Rising, Apiary, Aster(ix) and is forthcoming in All About Skin: An Anthology of Short Fiction by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color. She is the founder of Thread Makes Blanket press, http://www.threadmakesblanket.com, which most recently published Dismantle, an anthology of work from VONA, an annual workshop for writers of color. As part of her teaching at Community College of Philadelphia, Marissa teaches in Philadelphia jails, develops Latino courses, and tries hard to get her students to love reading and writing. She is working on her first novel.
NALINI JONES is the author of What You Call Winter, a story collection set in a Catholic neighborhood of Mumbai. She is a recipient of an NEA fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story and Ninth Letter, among others, and she has contributed to anthologies about siblings, HIV in India, and Miles Davis. She is currently at work on a novel.
Andrea Juele writes nonfiction and poetry in the New York metro area. Her work moves between the natural world, the ethereal, and the comically mundane, finding wonder in the everyday. She is currently working on a book-length project evoking family and home in The Philippines via memories of food. When not writing, she interns at the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and works full-time at an NYC steakhouse—both places where she finds inspiration for her stories about family and memorable meals.
Sabreen Kadhim is City of Asylum's poet-in-residence from Iraq. She has published poems widely in Iraqi magazines and newspapers, such as Al-Sabah, Al-Taakhi, and Al-Zamaan newspapers as well as Al-Esbuaya Magazine and Al-Hurra TV. She was the winner of the 3rd UNESCO Poetry Contest in 2011 and jointly won the Iraqi Youth Poetry Festival competition in 2012 (organized by the Culture For All Association). Her debut poetry collection, I Introduce Myself To Water, is awaiting publication.
Magda Kapa, born in Greece and now living in northern Germany,
worked as a freelance screenwriter and Modern Greek and English teacher. Her first poetry collection All the Words was published by Phoenicia Publishing. She is also a photographer and blogs http://notborninenglish.wordpress.com/ and tweets as @MagdaKapa.
A mother of four and a retired biology teacher, born in 1954 to parents who came from Romania and endured the sufferings of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Today she writes, sings in a choir, takes different classes and volunteers in school to help children with biology. Published two books of poetry and short stories.
Madhu Kaza was born in Andhra Pradesh, India and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. She is currently an educator, writer and artist based in New York. Much of her work is informed by her astonishment at everyday life.
Ani Kazarian writes essays, short stories, and screenplays, and is at work
on her first novel. Her research interests include literature, culture,
history, and trauma. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.
John Keene's Counternarratives (New Directions) was published
in the spring of 2015, with a British edition appearing in 2016. He
is also the author of Annotations (New Directions), the poetry-art
collection Seismosis (1913 Press), with artist Christopher Stackhouse,
and the collaboration GRIND (ITI Press), with photographer Nicholas
Muellner. His translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst's Letters from a
Seducer appeared in 2014 from Nightboat Books and A Bolha Editora. A
longtime member of the Dark Room Collective and a Graduate Fellow
of Cave Canem, he currently is a member of the African Poetry Book
Fund, and serves as Chair of African American and African Studies
and Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark.
Oonya Kempadoo is a novelist who was born in the UK of Guyanese parentage.
Rosamond S. King is a creative and critical writer, performer, and artist whose work is deeply informed by her cultures and communities, by history, and by a sense of play. Her poetry has appeared in more than two dozen journals and anthologies, and her manuscript Rock|Salt|Stone is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.
King has performed in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and throughout North America. She is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College and author of the award-winning scholarly book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination.
Her goal is to make people feel, wonder, and think, in that order.
Born and raised outside Rochester, New York, Erin Koehler graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 2015 with a B.A. in English (creative writing) and a minor in Native American studies. Her poetry has been featured in Terrain, The Susquehanna Review, and Gandy Dancer, and was selected for the Adroit Journal Editor's List for the 2015 Prize for Poetry. Erin currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts, where she hopes to pursue a career writing children's literature.
Ana-Maurine Lara's poetry and short fiction has appeared in several literary journals including Blithe House Quarterly, The Encyclopedia Project, Sable LitMag and Torch Magazine. She has received awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Puffin Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council and PEN Northwest. Her debut novel, Erzulie's Skirt, was selected as a Lambda Literary finalist in 2006; her second (unpublished) novel, Anacaona's Daughter, won Third Place Prize in the National Latino/Chicano Literary Prizes.
Ana-Maurine is a Cave Canem Fellow and a member of The Austin Project, a collaborative workshop between artists, activists and scholars out of UT-Austin. She coordinates an oral history project documenting the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender artists titled: We are the Magicians, the Path Breakers and the Dream Makers (http://themagicmakers.blogspot.com/) and is also co-author of bustingbinaries.com: a website dedicated to addressing binary thinking in U.S. based social justice movements. She is a graduate of Harvard University.
Currently she resides in Austin, TX.
Check out her website www.zorashorse.com and Blogspot: http://zorashorse.blogspot.com/
Visit: http://www.myspace.com/zorashorse
To view a short reading from debut novel: Erzulie's Skirt - A Novel
Natalie M. Léger is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She completed a PhD in English Literature at Cornell University in the field of Caribbean and postcolonial literature and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tufts University. Her research explores coloniality and anti-blackness in the Caribbean literary imaginary. Her current book project, Envision Otherwise: Haiti and the Decolonial Imaginary, concerns the theoretical and artistic importance of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution to to radical decolonial thought in the Caribbean.
Dr. Raina J. León, CantoMundo fellow, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra : (dis)locate. She has received numerous fellowships and residencies including the Macdowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of LatinX arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary's College of California and a board member of ARISE High School in Oakland.
Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books of include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California.
Michelle Lin is a poet, editor, and activist. She earned her MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and her BA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside. She has taught for the LEAPS summer program, Gluck Fellows Program for the Arts, Young Writer's Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh. She has edited for journals Hot Metal Bridge, B. E. Quarterly, and Mosaic. She currently serves as Poetry Reader for Twelfth House Journal. She works for API Legal Outreach, a social justice non-profit serving marginalized communities in the greater Bay Area. Her full length poetry collection A House Made of Water is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2017.
Lucia LoTempio hails from Buffalo, NY and is currently an instructor and MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a sucker for tiny animals and tiny babies. She was a finalist for the Black Warrior Review 10th Annual Contest in Poetry and for the Winter Tangerine Annual Awards. Lucia counts for VIDA and is on the advisory board for Gandy Dancer.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a poet & educator living in Brooklyn by way of Boston. She is the author of chapbooks rude girl is lonely girl! & peluda. Her work has been featured in Remezcla, Buzzfeed, Glamour Magazine, Muzzle, Bustle, Huffington Post, & The Guardian. She is currently an MFA candidate at NYU's Graduate Program for Creative Writing.
Andrew Kenower
Poet and activist Dawn Lundy Martin earned a BA at the University of Connecticut, an MA at San Francisco State University, and a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Her poetry collections include Discipline (2011), chosen by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Prize, and A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007), which was selected for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Precise, tender, and unflinching, Martin's work is at once innovative and emotionally fraught. Fanny Howe described the poems in Discipline as "dense and deep. They are necessary, and hot on the eye."
With Vivien Labaton, Martin coedited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (2004). She also cofounded both the Third Wave Foundation and the post-theorist Black Took Collective. She has received the Academy of American Arts and Science's May Sarton Prize for Poetry as well as grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Martin has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, The New School, and Bard College.
Marlin M. Jenkins is learning how to love himself. Born and raised in Detroit, he is a poetry student in University of Michigan's MFA program. His writings have been given homes by The Collagist, The Journal, Word Riot, and The Offing, among others. You can find him online at marlinmjenkins.tumblr.com and @Marlin_Poet.
Elena Machado Sáez is a Professor of English at Bucknell University. She is author of Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (University of Virginia Press 2015). She is also coauthor with Raphael Dalleo of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2007).
Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collection one-bedroom solo (Fly by Night Press, 2011). Her 2nd publication, that's what you get, is forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She lives in uptown Manhattan where she is working on an ongoing project about a lifelong obsession with the ancient Maya.
Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press,
2016). A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing
from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem,
the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Poets House,
and the Vermont Studio Center. She serves as East Coast Editor of Jamii
Publishing and is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Her
work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day
Series, African American Review, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal,
Muzzle Magazine, Sou'wester, Pedestal Magazine, Tidal Basin, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Josina Manu Maltzman writes:
"I am a carpenter by day, a production manager by night, a writer by passion, and a rabble-rouser by everything else. I've been writing short stories and essays for as long as memory provides, with the honor of being published in That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation in 2004. I have had also the pleasure of working with Ananya Dance Theatre as Production Manager for the company, since January 2013. This allows me to combine my organizational and creative efforts, working with a dance company rooted in values of social, racial and environmental justice — the same values that propel me in my personal endeavors. Currently I am working on a mytho-biography spanning multiple generations of a Jewish family, which relates historical trauma to cycles of violence, both intimate and global. I was awarded a MN State Arts Board Artist's Initiative Grant in 2014 to further this project."
Katherinna Mar is a writer based in Chicago. She's currently an MFA candidate at Bennington College.
Vanessa Mártir is a NYC-based writer, educator, and mama. She is completing her memoir, Relentless, and chronicles her journey in her blog (vanessamartir.wordpress.com). A five-time VONA/Voices fellow, Mártir now serves as the organization's Workshop Director and newsletter editor. Her essays have appeared in The Butter, Poets & Writers Magazine, Kweli Journal, and the VONA/Voices Anthology, Dismantle, among others. In 2011, Mártir created the Writing Our Lives Workshop, through which she's led hundreds of writers through the process of writing personal essay. She has penned two novels, Woman's Cry (Augustus Publishing, 2007) and The Right Play (unpublished); and co-wrote Do Something!: A Handbook for Young Activists (Workman Publishing, 2010).
Rachel Masilamani has been making comics since 1997. Her first comics collection, RPM Comics #1, received a grant from the Xeric Foundation and was named "Best Comic Book" by the Baltimore City Paper. Since then, her comics have appeared in Meathaus, Street Runoff, Graphics Classics, The Indiana Review and other anthologies.
Aurora Masum-Javed is a poet, performer, and educator. She is currently completing her MFA in poetry at Cornell. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Jaggery, So to Speak, and Callaloo. She was recently a fellow at the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop.
Keya Mitra is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and
literature at Pacific University and graduated in 2010 with a doctorate from the University of Houston¹s Creative Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA. She also worked as an assistant professor of creative writing at Gonzaga University for three years. In 2008, Keya spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing. Keya¹s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review (in 2011 and 2015), Arts and Letters, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Southwest Review, Slush Pile, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation. She has completed a novel as well as a short-story collection and memoir.
Furthermore, one of Keya¹s novels has been a semifinalist for the Amazon
Breakthrough Novel Award, and her short story collection has been a finalist for the Bakeless Prize, the Flannery O¹Connor Short Fiction Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. In 2005, Keya received a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer¹s Conference. Keya also had the privilege of working as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts for two years.
Jessica Lanay is a poet and short story writer originally from the Florida Keys. She is interested in writing towards the incalculable nature of human emotions, psychology and metaphysical dilemmas. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and works at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow; she has workshopped with poets such as Carl Hancock Rux, Gregory Pardlo, Evie Shockley, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. She also founded a women's editorial group called The Jasper Collective while working in the advertising department of Poets & Writers Magazine. It was during her work with the Jasper Collective that she had her first publishing successes. She believes that working with a diverse body of women in editorial partnership was a large reason for achieving those publications. Jessica Lanay's writing can be found in Five Quarterly, Crab Fat Literary Magazine, TAYO Literary Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Duende, and Black Candies: A Journal of Literary Horror and others. She is currently working on a collection of poetry and a short story collection.
Carley Moore is a feminist dreamer, kale lover, boot wearer, reluctant multi-tasker, writer, professor, ally, and mom. Her debut collection of essays, 13 Pills, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions in 2017. You can find more of her work at her or follow her on Twitter @carleymoore2.
Anthony Morales is a writer/educator from the Bronx who has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry and toured the US and Puerto Rico. He is a VONA alum and facilitator of La SOPA workshops in NYC. He has been an English teacher in public schools for 15 years. He has published Story Avenue (2005) Chevere Cafre (2007) dice queso (2010) Hood Night (2011) So Far (2015) and soon to be released Ponerme Yo (2016). He still writes by the chessboard benches in Clason Point Gardens. He can be found at various cyphers and open mics and conferences spitting his Nuyorican Ghetto Gospels for the blocks, hoods, goons, goblins, and illiterati alike. Check him out at anthonymorales.blogspot.com.
Saretta Morgan is Brooklyn-based reader/animal keeper/letter writer/plant waterer and water color enthusiast interested in organization, [queer/public/adverse] intimacies, shame and being Black.
Courtney Desiree Morris is an assistant professor of African American and Women's studies at Pennyslvania State University and studies Black women's social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. She received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on Afro-Nicaraguan women's political activism since the Sandinista Revolution and she is currently completing a book on this research. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship and a Fulbright.
Lina Mounzer is a writer and translator living and working in Beirut. Her work has appeared in Bidoun, Warscapes, The Berlin Quarterly, Chimurenga and Literary Hub. She is the prose editor for the Beirut-based literary journal Rusted Radishes, and has translated, from Arabic to English, short stories by Chaza Charafeddine and Mazen Maarouf and a novel by Hassan Daoud. Among other things, she is at work on her first novel.
Oindrila Mukherjee has an MFA from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in CreativeWriting from the University of Houston. Oindrila worked as a journalist in Calcutta before moving to the U.S. where she has worked as a fiction and review editor for Gulf Coast journal. Her fiction was most recently published in Indian Voices, an anthology of emerging Indian writers from around the world. She is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University.
Mankwe Ndosi is a singer/ musicmaker and a cultural catalyst who is studying her Tanzanian heritage, medicinal plants, and living simply and creatively with others. She works in the Twin Cities, Chicago and internationally. She weaves performance genres including improvised music, acapella rhythm and harmonies, hip-hop, afro soul, dance, performance art, and sung prayer/ritual. She infuses creative practice into healing, sustainable economic development, education, and new village community building.
Interdisciplinary poet and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was born and raised in Harlem. She studied at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and earned an MA at New York University and an MFA at California College of the Arts.
Diggs is the author of the poetry collection TwERK (2013) and several chapbooks, as well as the album Television (2003). She has been a poetry editor for the online arts journal exittheapple and, with writer Greg Tate, is a founding editor of YoYo/SO4 magazine. Diggs's interdisciplinary work has been featured in exhibits at several New York museums, including the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Her additional honors include scholarships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Harlem Community Arts Fund, the Jerome Foundation, the Eben Demarest Trust, Caldera Arts, Black Earth Institute, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation. She lives in New York City.
Idra Novey is the author of the debut novel Ways to Disappear, a New York Times Editors' Choice. Her poetry collection Exit, Civilian was selected by Patricia Smith for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into eight languages and she's written for The New York Times, NPR's All Things Considered, and The Paris Review. She's translated the work of several prominent Brazilian writers, most recently Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H.
Isobel O'Hare is a poet and essayist who has dual Irish and American citizenship. She is the author of the chapbooks Wild Materials (Zoo Cake Press, 2015), The Garden Inside Her (Ladybox Books, 2016), and Heartbreak Machinery (forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2018). Two of her poems appeared in A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault, published in 2017 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press. A collaboration with the poet Sarah Lyn Rogers will be published in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her debut full-length, a collection of erasures of public statements by celebrities accused of sexual abuse, All This Can Be Yours, is forthcoming from University of Hell Press.
Cecca Austin Ochoa is a queer fiction writer of Salvadoran descent. Her
fiction has appeared in Art XX, MAKE: Literary Magazine, Nat. Brut,
Anthologized in Pariahs (SFA Press) and forthcoming in IMANIMAN
(Aunt Lute Press). Cecca serves as Managing Editor for Apogee Journal.
She is a 2014 Alumnus of Voices of Our Nation's Artists. In 2011, she
received the Astraea Foundation's Lesbian Writers Award. She is currently at work on her first novel Desaparecida about a young woman adopted during the Civil War in El Salvador and raised in the United States.
Birgül Oğuz, a fiction and nonfiction writer from Turkey, was among the winners of the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature for her latest short fiction collection Hah (2012), now being translated into thirteen languages. A PhD candidate in English Literature at Bosphorus University, she lectures on literature at independent academic institutions and theater houses in Istanbul.
Eiko Otake is a Japanese choreographer/dancer who has lived in New
York since 1976. Since 1972 she and her partner Koma have collaborated
as the performance team Eiko & Koma, creating and presenting a
unique theater of movement in diverse venues worldwide, including
numerous appearances at the American Dance Festival, the Brooklyn
Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, and a month-long "living"
gallery installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Eiko &
Koma have received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship
in 1996.
Janeil Page's poetry has been published most recently in Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Bluffs Literary Magazine and as part of a collaborative poetry collection through Gold Quoin Press. She is a poet in a small town in Illinois and holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars.
Ayşe Papatya Bucak teaches in the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University. Her prose has been published in a variety of magazines, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, and The Rumpus. Her short fiction has been selected for the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes. She is a contributing editor for the literary journal Copper Nickel.
Vanessa Pérez is an Associate Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and the editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement. She serves as an associate investigator on the City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB), a collaborative project of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Tanya Pérez-Brennan is based in Boston and works as a Spanish interpreter/translator, specializing in medical and legal terminology. She is also a freelance journalist, having served as a regular contributor to Foxnewslatino.com and The Boston Globe, and as a former staff writer for The Orlando Sentinel and The Florida Times-Union. Her poems have been published in Zalacain, The Harvard Journal of Ibero America and in Liberation Poetry: An Anthology (Trilingual Press, 2012). Tanya has a Master's in Journalism from Columbia University and an MFA from Bennington College. She is finishing her first novel, a mother-daughter story set in Colombia.
Audrey Peterson is a writer and editor, and the former editor of American Legacy, the magazine of African-American history and culture. She is completing a family memoir about her German and African-American roots that includes the search for the truth about her grandfather, a German officer in World War II, and the lynching of a young man in Alabama, who may or may not have been her relative. Audrey lives in New York City and works in the communications department at Brooklyn College.
Junauda Petrus is a writer, aerialist, performance artist, runaway witch and soul sweetener. She has written for the page, stage and screen and loves to produce wild and powerful pieces with her experimental arts collective, Free Black Dirt, with co-creator, Erin Sharkey. She is grateful to be an artist in this lifetime and loves to create art that seeks to explore, expand and excite around the experience of Blackness and love and light. In March she directed her play "There Are Other Worlds," a piece that uses aerial, movement and soundscape to tell the story of incarceration, blackness, motherhood and love.
Janelle Poe is a writer, Harlemite, City College MFA student, DJ & digger who loves uncovering hidden gems and connections, finding this approach widely applicable. A background in International Studies and life as a black woman in America and abroad, she writes about the inherent intersectionality of injustice. A VONA participant, she is ever grateful for the leaders, including Aster(ix), crafting space for the expression and amplification of marginalized voices. Combining her poetry with images by Sheryl Oppenheim, the two recently published a zine to raise funds for Black Lives Matter entitled,"Black & White Studies" with Small Editions. Currently at work on a collection of short stories and essays, illustrious publications and titles are forthcoming. This is one. Following her dreams, she encourages you to follow yours. www.Elle-DJ.com.
Russian writer Anzhelina Polonskaya is the author of eight poetry collections and one short story collection, published between 1994 and 2013. Her work has been shortlisted for the 2005 Corneliu Popescue Prize for European Poetry in Translation, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. She is a member of the Moscow Union of Writers and the Russian PEN Centre. She was forced to flee her country after Russian nationalists attacked her for her poetic contribution to an oratorio requiem for the KURSK submarine disaster, a taboo subject in Russia. Anzhelina Polonskaya is the current ICORN writer-in-residence of the City of Refuge in Frankfurt, Germany.
Antropóloga. Activista por los derechos civiles. Defensora de las mujeres y los hombres que trabajan la tierra.
Celeste Prince calls the city of Lakewood, CO home, has familial roots in Guyana, South America, and spent her college years in St. Paul, MN, at Macalester College. She is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and a recipient of the Harry Schermann award for prose from the Macalester English department. She is currently a first year MFA student at the University of Houston. Her writing focuses on how contemporary people of color develop identity in predominantly-white spaces. In spare moments, she enjoys listening to Top 40 music, crocheting, and drinking different types of tea.
Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Akashic Books 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011), Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015). Her fifth book, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, will be published in spring 2017 by YesYes Books. She teaches in the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.
Noel Quiñones is an AfroBoricua writer, performer, and educator born and raised in the Bronx. He has received fellowships from Poets House, CantoMundo, and Brooklyn Poets. His poetry will be included in the forthcoming "¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets" published by Arte Publico Press, having already been published in Pilgrimage Press, Winter Tangerine Review, Asymptote, & elsewhere. Noel is the founder of Project X, an arts organization dedicated to uplifting the voice of Bronx and Latinx artists, and the co-founder of Piel Cafe Poetry, an AfroLatino Spoken Word Collective on tour throughout the United States. Visit him at www.elninoquinones.com or @NQNino322
Emily Raboteau is the author of The Professor's Daughter and Searching for Zion, winner of a 2014 American Book Award and a finalist for the Hurston Wright Award. She is currently Distinguished Faculty in the CUNY Graduate Center's Advanced Research Collaborative, where she's completing her third book.
Sue Rainsford is a writer and researcher based in Dublin.
Marlène Ramírez-Cancio is Associate Director, Arts & Media, at NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Hemi connects artists, scholars, and activists working at the intersection of artistic practice and social transformation. She is also co-founder and co-director of Fulana, a Latina video collective in NYC that uses parody and satire as a critical tool to explore themes that are relevant to Latinxs in the US, making visible what we're so often made to read between the lines. Fulana's works have been shown internationally at film festivals, museums, galleries, universities and online at fulana.org.
Vanita Reddy is an Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her articles have appeared in the journals South Asian Popular Culture, Contemporary Literature, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is the author of Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Temple UP, 2016), one of the first books to consider beauty and fashion as a point of entry into an examination of South Asian diasporic public cultures. She is also co-editing an issue of Scholar and Feminist Online called "Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations," which is forthcoming in Fall 2017
Bushra Rehman grew up in Corona, Queens but her mother says she was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure, but it would explain a few things.
Luivette Resto was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico but proudly raised in the Bronx. She earned her bachelors in English Literature from Cornell University in 1999 and later her M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry in 2003 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Program for Poets and Writers. Her first book of poetry Unfinished Portrait was published in 2008 by Tia Chucha Press, whose editor is our current Los Angeles poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez, and later the book was named a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize. She has served as a contributing poetry editor for Kweli Journal, a CantoMundo fellow, and a member of the advisory board of Con Tinta. Her new book Ascension was published in April 2013 courtesy of Tia Chucha Press, and it was recently selected for the 2014 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for previous finalists of the Paterson Poetry Prize. Some of her latest work can be read on Luna Luna Magazine, Toe Good Poetry, Upworthy, Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and the Altadena Anthology 2015. Currently, she lives in Glendora with her three children.
Irina Reyn's new novel The Imperial Wife will be published by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press July 2016. Irina's first novel What Happened to Anna K. was published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster in August 2008. Irina's work has appeared in some of the following publications: One Story, Post Road, Tin House, Los Angeles Times, Town & Country Travel, Poets & Writers, The Forward, San Francisco Chronicle, The Moscow Times. Irina was born in Moscow, and currently divides her time between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
Matt Richardson is Associate Professor in English and African and African Diaspora Studies. He is affiliated with the Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. He has published articles in The Journal of Women's History, Black Camera: A Journal Devoted to the Study and Documentation of the Black Cinematic Experience, Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of the NSRC and The Journal of Women's History, as well as works of fiction in publications like Queer Codex and Does Your Mama Know: African American Coming Out Stories. He received the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship National Fellowship for Junior Faculty and the Dean's Fellowship in 2009.
Sarah Rifky is an Egyptian writer and curator. She is co-founder of Beirut (2012-2015) an art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo. She is the author of numerous essays of art and other speculative fiction. Currently she is pursuing her PhD in History, Theory and Criticism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is a fellow of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.
Gabby Rivera is a writer, youth mentor, and editor of queer/trans POC content for Autostraddle. She works as an educator and manager of youth programming for GLSEN. Her short stories and poems have been published in various anthologies such as the Lambda-Award-winning Portland Queer: Tales from the Rose City, OMG I'm Gay, a 'zine for queer youth, and The Best of Panic! En Vivo from the East Village. Her writing and queer perspective have been featured on PBS, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, DapperQ, and at her family's dinner table over black beans and rice. Gabby's first novel is set to be published at the end of 2015.
Ivelisse Rodriguez holds an MFA from Emerson College and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the English/Creative Writing program. She has had work published in the Boston Review, Migente.com, Latinostories.com, and other outlets. She is currently finishing her short story collection, which mostly focuses on adolescent Puerto Rican girls and their conceptions of womanhood. She has also begun work on a novel about the African Diaspora in Puerto Rico.
Scholar of twentieth-century cultural activism with a focus on ethnicity and gender from the 1960s-today. Assistant Professor at University of Pittsburgh.
Nelly Rosario is author of Song of the Water Saints: A Novel (Pantheon, 2002), winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Her work appears in various anthologies and journals, including Callaloo, Meridians, Review, Chess Life, and el diario/La Prensa. Rosario holds an MFA from Columbia University and was formerly on faculty in the MFA Program at Texas State University. At present, she does writing and research for the Blacks at MIT History Project and collaborates on desveladas, a writing collective engaged in visual conversations across the Americas. Rosario lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Em Rose is an MFA student at CUNY – City College. She holds a B.A. from Columbia, where her poems appeared in student publications Surgam, Quarto, Proxy, and Fawlt Mag. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Venezuela, researching maroon history. She previously worked as a housing organizer in Harlem and at GOLES on the Lower East Side, where she still works as a grant writer. She's received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. "The Chemist's Wife" is her first published story.
Lauren Russell is the author of one previous chapbook, The Empty-Handed Messenger (Goodbye Better, 2009). Her poems and reviews have appeared in various places, including Eleven Eleven, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Harp & Altar, Lyre Lyre, Boog City, The Recluse, and Van Gogh's Ear. She is an M.F.A. student at the University of Pittsburgh and counts the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, AmeriCorps*NCCC, and Goddard College among her alma maters.
Zohra Saed is a co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology
of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas
Press). Her essays on the Central Asian diaspora and their food history
have appeared in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU
Press), and in The Asian American Literary Review. Misspelled Cities/
Falsch geschriebene Stadte: Sahar Muradi and Zohra Saed, a bilingual
English/German chapbook, was published for documenta13. She is the
co-founder and editor of Brooklyn's Upset Press. As part of her work on
Central Asian literatures she is translating Turkestani poems from the
early twentieth century.
Joshunda Sanders is a writer and journalist who has learned to make home wherever she can. She has written for Bitch, Salon, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Huizache, the Bellevue Literary Review and many other publications. Her book, How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media: Why The Future of Journalism Depends on Women and People of Color was published by Praeger/ABC-CLIO in August 2015. She lives in Washington D.C.
Robin Scofield, author of And the Ass Saw the Angel and Sunflower Cantos (Mouthfeel Press), has poems appearing in The Malpais Review, The Texas Weather Anthology, and Pilgrimage. Her next full-length collection, Drive, comes out in 2016. She is poetry editor for BorderSenses and writes with the Tumblewords Project in El Paso, where she lives with her husband and her Belgian Shepherd.
Sejal Shah's essays and stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Brevity, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and others. Her collection of stories, How to Make Your Mother Cry, was a finalist for the 2017 Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books and the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize from Pleiades Press. "The Girl with Two Brothers" is part of this collection. Her nonfiction manuscript, Things People Say, was named a finalist for the 2017 Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Essay Collection Prize and the 2016 Kore Press Memoir-in-Essays Prize, (selected by Lidia Yuknavitch). She's currently looking for a home for both books. She lives in Rochester, New York.
Known for her sparkly eyeshadow and raucous laughter, Purvi Shah inspires change as a non-profit consultant, anti-violence advocate, and writer. She is curious about the power of language as inquiry and understanding, as a bridge between unknowns, as part of the dreamwork of transformation and justice. During the 10th anniversary of 9/11, she directed Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight Asian American voices and experiences. In Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press: 2006), she plumbs migrations and belongings. Her new poetry chaplet, Dark Lip of the Beloved: Sound Your Fiery God-Praise (Belladonna*: 2015), explores the devotions and configurations of women. Recently she was selected for INKTank, a 12-week residency for playwrights hosted by the Rising Circle Theater Collective.
Mahwash Shoaib is a poet, translator and scholar. Her nonfiction,
fiction, poetry and scholarly articles have appeared in many anthologies
and journals. Her translations of the poetry of Kishwar Naheed,
Wrapped in Dread and Dynamite, will be published by Upset Press. She
currently teaches in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Laura Sims is the author of four books of poetry: Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), My god is this a man, Stranger, and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books). In 2014 she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist (powerHouse Books). Her work was included in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and individual poems have recently appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, andGulf Coast. She has published book reviews and essays in Boston Review, Evening Will Come, Jacket, New England Review, Rain Taxi and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Grace Singh Smith was born and raised in Assam, India; she currently lives in Santa Monica. Her short stories have appeared in the Santa Monica Review, and Cleaver Magazine. Smith is an MFA candidate at Bennington College, and is at work on her first novel. Her short story "The Promotion" (Santa Monica Review, Spring 2015) was listed as a Notable in Best American Short Stories 2016, edited by Junot Diaz.
Melissa R. Sipin is a writer from Carson, CA. She won Glimmer Train's Fiction Open and ON-SQU's Flash Fiction Prize. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology on Philippine myths (Carayan Press 2014), and her work is in Guernica, Eleven Eleven, and Hyphen Magazine, among others. Cofounder of TAYO Literary Magazine, her fiction has won scholarships/fellowships from Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and was shortlisted for the David Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. As the Poets & Writers McCrindle Fellow in Los Angeles, she is hard at work on a short story collection and novel.
Egyptian journalist and writer, Soad Suliman has written many novels and short story collections, including "Keda bi Basata" (Thus Simply), and the three novels "al-Mobah" (The Permissible), "al-Raqes" (The Dancer), and "Shahwet al-Malayka" (The Angels' Desire). She lives in Cairo.
Jenelle Troxell received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Union College. She is a co-editor of the journal Convolution and is presently at work on a book manuscript What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes: Transnationalism, Feminism, and the Cinematic Avant-garde.
Noah Myers fell in love with the Spanish language and culture of Latin America growing up, of all places, in rural Missouri. During his BA, he studied in Mendoza, Argentina, and later taught English in Tunja, Colombia, before going on to complete his MA in Hispanic Literature from the University of North Carolina. He has published reviews and presented scholarly works about a variety of subjects, with particular interest in contemporary afro-descendent and indigenous writers of Colombia and the Caribbean. This is his first, and he hopes the first of many, literary translations.
Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria. She is the author of four novels, including On Black Sisters Street (2009, 2011 Jonathan Cape, UK and Random House NY) and Night Dancer (Jonathan Cape, 2012). Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Guernica, Aeon and many other journals. Her works have been translated into several languages. A recipient of several awards and fellowships, she has recently been awarded a teaching position at Brown University, Rhode Island.
Vocalist, composer, cultural worker Imani Uzuri is an eclectic interdisciplinary artist who creates concerts, experimental theater, performance art, theater compositions, and sound installations in venues/festivals, including Central Park SummerStage, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, Blue Note Jazz Club, Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, Performa Biennial, Festival Sons d'hiver, London's ICA, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Uzuri has collaborated with a wide range of noted artists across various artistic disciplines, including Herbie Hancock, Wangechi Mutu, John Legend, Vijay Iyer, Carrie Mae Weems, Trajal Harrell, Sanford Biggers, and Robert Ashley. Her acclaimed new album The Gypsy Diaries draws on her rural Southern roots, as well as influences ranging from Sufi devotionals to Romany laments. Uzuri is currently composing a new musical GIRL Shakes Lose Her Skin, inspired by the works of Philadelphia Poet Laureate Sonia Sanchez. Recently, Uzuri premiered her first orchestral composition Placeless at Ecstatic Music Festival, and was subsequently named by The New Yorker as one of the emerging "female composers edg[ing] forward."
Kelsey is a freelance writer and editor based in Texas. She is currently working on a manuscript and literary journal. Her main interests are narratology, translingualism, and metafiction.
Hecha en México, Norma Liliana Valdez made her way to California in her mother's pregnant belly. She is an alumna of the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop, the Writing Program at UC Berkeley Extension, and was a 2014 Hedgebrook writer-in-residence. She is the winner of the 2016 Tinderbox Poetry Journal prize with her poem "Tepoztlán Blues", selected by Eduardo C. Corral. A member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop and a CantoMundo fellow, her poems appear in Calyx, Huizache, Rio Grande Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others.
Michelle Yasmine Valladares is an immigrant born in India and raised in Kuwait. She is a poet and filmmaker and is the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at City College of New York in Harlem. Her first book is Nortada, The North Wind. Her poems have been widely published and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won the Distinguished Documentary Achievement from the Independent Documentary Association for "El Diablo Nunca Duerme" co-produced with Lourdes Portillo and Best Latin American Film at Sundance Festival for "O Sertão das Memórias " co-produced with José Araújo.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, essayist, and Spanish language
translator at large in New York City. Her work has appeared at the
Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker online, Lit Hub, The Point, The New York Times Magazine, The Offing, The Awl, and elsewhere. She recently won Gulf Coast's 2016 Prize for her translations of the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma. She is the happy recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, and Columbia University, where she is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. Find her @fluentmundo on Twitter.
Sarah Vap is the author of six collections of poetry. Her most recent
book, Viability, was selected by Mary Jo Bang for the National Poetry
Series and was released by Penguin in 2016. She is the recipient of an
NEA Literature fellowship for poetry and a Research Enhancement
Fellowship from the University of Southern California for a year of writer and research in West Africa. She lives with her family in Venice, CA.
M.L. Vargas is a writer, educator and serves as poetry editor for Aster(ix) Journal. She was appointed poet in residence for the Montclair Art Museum (MAM) in 2014. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, most recently The Lake Rises: poems to & for our bodies of water. She holds an MFA in poetry from Drew University and lives in New Jersey.
Rich Villar is a poet, essayist, activist, and educator originally from Paterson, New Jersey. His first collection of poems, Comprehending Forever (Willow Books), was a finalist for the 2015 International Latino Book Award. He has been quoted on Latino/a literature and culture by HBO and The New York Times. He is an alum of the VONA/Voices Workshop (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He maintains his personal blog at literatiboricua.com and is a contributor to Latino Rebels and Sofrito For Your Soul.
Olivia Rose Walton is a writer from South Africa who lives in Istanbul.
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which
won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom's 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. It was also listed by NPR as one of the Best Book of 2014 and became a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Tiphanie's collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35. Her writing has also won the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet's Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is an associate professor at Wesleyan University. She lives in New Rochelle, New York with her husband, teacher and photographer Moses Djeli, and their three children.
Leslie C. Youngblood received an MFA from the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro and served as columnist and assistant editor for Atlanta Tribune: The Magazine. She's been awarded a host of writing honors including a 2014 Yaddo's Elizabeth Ames Residency, the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize, a Hurston Wright Fellowship, 2010 Go On Girl! Book Club Aspiring Writer Award, and the Room of Her Own Foundation's 2009 Orlando Short Story Prize. She received funding to attend the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony in 2011. The first
novel excerpt was published Kweli Journal, 2014. Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and raised in Rochester, New York, she's fortunate to have a family of natural storytellers and a circle of supportive and family and friends. Publication of her first novel, Love Like Sky, is forthcoming.
Georgia born writer Shay Youngblood is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris and Soul Kiss (Riverhead Books) and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories (Firebrand Books). Her published plays Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery and Talking Bones, (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Square Blues, Black Power Barbie and Communism Killed My Dog. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, an Edward Albee honoree, several NAACP Theater Awards, an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction and a 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Sustained Achievement Award. Ms. Youngblood received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University and has taught Creative Writing to faculty and graduate students at NYU and has been Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi and Texas A&M Universities. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts sponsored Japan-US Creative Artist Fellowship for 2011.


text:
Terrible title, I know. But I couldn't resist.
Blogging is a lot of work, which is why for the last several months I was on a blogging hiatus over at my old blog, Let Them Grumble. During this time frame, I put together my first collection of poetry/short stories and wrote 10 000 words on my new contemporary YA novel (huzzah!).
But I missed blogging.
This is why I'm picking it up again, but not on Let Them Grumble. This is my new blog. Welcome. Greetings. Live long and prosper.
I'm still going to be focusing on working on my current project (I want the first draft to be finished by the end of October), but I'm planning on posting once or twice a week — about writing, reading, interesting things I read or write or find. Pictures or rhymes or rambles. Thoughts or questions or ideas. Perhaps a quote. Perhaps a word.
But the fact of the matter is, I'm back blogging, baby!

subset: commoncrawl