Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of five poetry collections, including Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum, Fall 2023 / Spring 2024), BABE (Diode Editions, 2021), Revenge of the Asian Woman(Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). They were a 2023 finalist for the Roethke Poetry Award for Revenge of the Asian Woman, 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club for BABE, a 2020 and 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) BIPOC literary arts organization, run by women, femme, and queer editors of color. Chan was the 2021 Resident Artist for Toward One Wisconsin. They are a 2022 recipient of the University of Wisconsin System’s Dr. P.B. Poorman Award for Outstanding Achievement on Behalf of LGBTQ People. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com
Ana Reyes has an MFA from Louisiana State University. Her short fiction, poetry and reviews have appeared in Bodega, Pear Noir!, The New Delta Review, and elsewhere. The House in the Pines, her first novel, is a New York Times Bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick.
Jordan LaHaye Fontenot is a writer and editor based in the Acadiana region of South Louisiana. A graduate of Louisiana State University and the recipient of the 2018 Sarah Sue Goldsmith Award for Nonfiction, her work has appeared in regional and international publications including inRegister, Atlas Obscura, and the Oxford American. She was a Writer-in-Residence at NUNU Arts and Culture Collective in Arnaudville in 2022 and 2023, and a panelist at the annual Society of Professional Journalists Conference in 2021. Her work has been published most extensively in the Louisiana culture magazine Country Roads, where she currently serves as Managing Editor. Her first book, a true crime memoir investigating the 1983 murder of her great grandfather, will be published by Mariner Books in the winter of 2024.
Pritha Bhattacharyya is a Bengali American writer. She is a fiction PhD candidate and Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She received her MFA from Boston University, where she was awarded a Leslie Epstein Global Fellowship to travel to Osaka, Japan. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tagore Society of Houston, and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She received the 2022 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction, was a finalist for the 2023 Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award for the Key West Literary Seminar, and was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s 2019 Short Story Award for New Writers. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere.
Tiana Nobile 문영신 is the author of Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). She is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, two-time finalist of the National Poetry Series, and a founding member of The Starlings Collective. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Guernica, Southern Cultures, and Lit Hub, among others. She lives with her family in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com
Alison Pelegrin is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Our Lady of Bewilderment and Waterlines, both with LSU Press. She is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as an ATLAS Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents. She is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, and recent work of hers has appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Bennington Review, and as a printable broadside at Broadsided.
Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her chapbook A Faster Grave won the 2019 Antenna Prize. Her work has been a finalist for the RATTLE Prize, the RHINO Founders’ Prize, and in 2021 she received the AWP Intro Journals Award and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. Skye’s work was selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. In 2022, she won the KGB Open Mic Contest in New York City, and served as the Writer-In-Residence at the Key West Literary Seminar in Florida.
Taylor Scott is a writer, performance artist, and musician from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern University with teaching and research interests in African-American literature, performance studies, Afro-pessimism, affect studies, and media studies. In 2022, she graduated from Louisiana State University with her PhD. In her praxis as an artist-scholar, she contributes to scholarly conversations about Black women’s creative production. Her dissertation, “‘My Name is Peaches’: Black Women’s Affect in the Blues Biomyth,” examines the autoethnographic and literary performances of blueswomen, namely Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, and Rihanna, to understand how these texts coalesce to demonstrate that there is futurity in rage. In 2015, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in Communications. She is also an alumna of the First Wave Hip Hop Theater Ensemble. Currently, Taylor is a working artist in her community, going into her sixth year as a poet-educator in Baton Rouge, where she has taught culturally relevant poetry and healing-centered workshops to hundreds of students in the East Baton Rouge School District through the non-profit organizations Forward Arts, The Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, and Humanities Amped. Lastly, her forthcoming album, Absolute Uncertainty, with her band, Timeless, is set to be released before the summer. This album is a multi-vocal project at the intersections of blues and pop.
Chancelier “Xero” Skidmore is a writer, spoken word poet, actor, educator, and musician from Plaquemine, Louisiana. He has called Baton Rouge home since moving there in 1992. He’s the co-founder The Baton Rouge Poetry Alliance. He is the former Executive Director of Forward Arts, where he and other teaching artists facilitated hundreds of poetry writing workshops for young people in and around Baton Rouge. He has published a collection of his poems entitled upBEAT DOWNbeat. He’s the former host of th Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge’s podcast AC23. In 2013, he won the Individual World Poetry Slam champonship. These days he plays percussion for The Michael Foster Project, auditions for acting gigs, and writes new material for his next spoken word poetry album.
Delta Mouth Literary Festival 