Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Loca is his debut novel.

Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the illustrated speculative memoir The Night Parade, the winner of the 2024 Chicago Review of Books Award for Nonfiction. The Night Parade was named a Best Book of 2023 by Boston Globe and New York Magazine, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. Jami has received support from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts/Japan-US Friendship Commission, Folger Shakespeare Library, Macdowell, Yaddo, Sewanee, We Need Diverse Books, and the Illinois Arts Council. Her essays and stories have been published in The New York Times, Sewanee Review, and Passages North, among others. She teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and is working on her next book.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Philyaw is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). 

Philyaw’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.

Minda Honey’s (she/her) essays on politics and relationships have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads. Her work is featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger”, “A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South”, and “Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic.” Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A, October 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time.

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, and the author of two collections of poems, including, most recently, Promises of Gold—which was long listed for the 2023 National Book Awards. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. Along with Felicia Rose Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Alongside Antonio Salazar, he published the hybrid book, Por Siempre in 2023. He lives in Jersey City, NJ. 

Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, where she is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, will be published by Random House in April, 2025, and Both/And, her anthology celebrating trans writers of color, is forthcoming from HarperOne.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her most recent book is Mother Water Ash (Louisiana University Press, Fall 2024) as well as six other poetry collections. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation at Queens College, City University of New York.

Vanessa Saunders is a Professor of Practice at Loyola University New Orleans. Her feminist, experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize with Fiction Collective 2 and was published by University of Alabama Press. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, The Writer’s Chronicle, and [PANK] among others. Vanessa has been offered residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Château d'Orquevaux. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she received her MFA from Louisiana State University. She is at work on a novel.

Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a Poetry Editor-at-Large for Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face, is forthcoming in August 2025 and is a September pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, from Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins.

noam keim (they/them) is a trauma worker, medicine maker and flâneur freak based on stolen Lenni-Lenape land known as Philadelphia where they create webs of support for communities impacted by the legal system. Born a settler of Palestine, noam grew up in France, before

moving to the United States with detours in Nepal, India, and Vietnam. Their non-fiction writing weaves themes close to their heart: antizionism, reverence to the land, healing, queerness, colonialism, plants. noam’s writing has been supported by Lambda Literary, Tin House, Sewanee and Roots.Wounds.Words and they are a Periplus fellow mentored by Grace Talusan. Their work can be found in ALOCASIA, The Massachusetts Review, The Kenyon Review and others. Their essay Fruits of the Desert was named Notable Best American Essay 2024. Connect on IG: noamkeim or noamkeim.com.