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 a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the collection was also 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. Deesha is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, and many more.

Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez is the author of For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color. She was born in Managua, Nicaragua but calls Nashville, Tennessee home. The bulk of her work is around making accessible, through storytelling and curating content, the theories and heavy material that is oftentimes only taught in the racist/classist institutions known as academia. Her writing is anthologized in Nevertheless, We Persisted and The Fearless Rise and Powerful Resonance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She started the platform Latina Rebels in 2013, and currently it boasts over 300k organic followers online. She has been featured in Telemundo, Univision, Mitú, Huffington Post Latino Voices, Guerrilla Feminism, Latina Mag, Cosmopolitan, Everyday Feminism, and was invited to the White House in the Fall of 2016. Que viva la gente!

Xan Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a Whiting Award, Lambda Literary Award, and the Judith A. Markowitz Award For Emerging Writers, Xan is the author of HULL (Nightboat Books 2019) and Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. They have received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and most recently, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan’s poetry is featured in Berlin Quarterly Review, BOMB Magazine, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Poets.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Their paintings have been featured in Kenyon Review, the Poetry Project, the cover of American Poets, and an AMFM exhibition at the Silver Room in Chicago.

Nisi Shawl is best known for fiction dealing with gender, race, and colonialism, including Nebula finalist Everfair, an alternate history of the Congo. They’re the coauthor of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusive representation, and cofounder of the Carl Brandon Society. Their criticism and essays appear widely, in one case as part of a volume of the Library of America. Shawl edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler; Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; and New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color. Awards include the World Fantasy Award, two Locus Awards, and FIYAH’s Ignyte Award.

Ignacio G Hutía Xeiti Rivera (they/them), M.A., is a cultural sociologist with expertise in sexual trauma, healing, and liberation for marginalized people. They are an internationally known gender non-conforming speaker, trainer, and consultant. Ignacio is the Founder and Executive Director at The HEAL Project.

Laia (she/her) is a yoga teacher (E-RYT 500 & YACEP) and writer who’s been teaching yoga for over 10 years and works with Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Laia’s teaching spaces are accessible and inclusive . Through yoga, meditation, breath, journaling, and music, Laia invites people to tap into their authentic and creative truth. She currently writes for yoga and wellness publications like Ekhart Yoga, Elephant Journal, Afrofeminas and Yogajala, and is working on her first fiction book.

Leeanne Bowen Atkins, (she/her) has loved the plant world from age 3 in “South Jersey,” where she plucked her first eggplant. Her people are Black and Jimsee (SC) on her mother’s side, and Yoruba, Ibo, Edo and Tsalagi (Appalachia) on her father’s. Ms. Bowen Atkins entered the Lukumi faith in 1998, and was made to Òyá in Brooklyn in 2005. Toward her BA in Afro-American Studies and Portuguese-Brazilian Studies from Smith College, she studied, praised God, and made family in Bahia… later, she gardened in grad school.

Alice Sparkly Kat (they/them) is an astrologer. They use astrology to re-chart a history of the subconscious, redefine the body in world, and reimagine history as collective memory. Their astrological work has inhabited MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Brooklyn Museum. They're the author of Postcolonial Astrology (May 2021).

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, among many others. Deesha is the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez is the author of For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts. She was born in Managua, Nicaragua but calls Nashville, TN home. She is unapologetic, angry, and uncompromising about protecting and upholding the stories of Latinx communities.

Elisabet Velasquez is a Boricua writer born in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Latina Magazine, We Are Mitú, Tidal, and more. Her debut novel, WHEN WE MAKE IT was named a book to watch for by The New York Times.

A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, Ken Liu (he/him) is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

Zeyn Joukhadar (he/they) is the author of The Thirty Names of Night, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist. His work has appeared in the Kink anthology, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere.

Ras Cutlass (she/they) lives with madness in Philadelphia, PA, and works by day in the human services industry. They write sci-fi about institutions and the people who resist them. Ras is are co-founder of Metropolarity Sci-fi Collective and Deep Space Mind 215 Co-op.

C. Quintana, or CQ (she/any) is a queer writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots based on Canarsee and Munsee Lenape land in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. CQ is the author of the full-length play Scissoring (Dramatists Play Service) and The Heart Wants, a chapbook of poetry (Finishing Line Press). Their poetry, lyric essay, and fiction is published or forthcoming in Third Coast, Foglifter, and beyond.

Prageeta Sharma is the author of Grief Sequence, among other works. She is the founder of Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. She teaches at Pomona College.

Joel L. Daniels, also known as Joél Leon, is a performer, author and story-teller who writes and tells stories for Black people. Born and raised in the Bronx, Joel specializes in moderating and leading conversations surrounding race, masculinity, mental health, creativity and the performing arts, with love at the center of his work and purpose. He is the author of Book About Things I Will Tell My Daughter and God Wears Durags, Too.

After dropping out of University of Albany in 2015, Kiki (she/her) had her first publishing internship with Wunderkind PR. There, she discovered a practical industry for her codependent love of fiction. In 2016, Kiki went on to intern with DMLA where she soon joined the team full-time as an assistant literary agent. Kiki is now building her client list within young adult and adult fiction with a focus on queer and BIPOC authors. Her literary debut will be featured in the upcoming YA Anthology, ALL SIGNS POINT TO YES, publishing in 2022.

Mariah Stovall is an agent at Trellis Literary Management, where she works on adult literary and upmarket fiction, narrative nonfiction, essay collections and memoir. She’s seeking writers with original, innovative voices and intersectional perspectives. She gravitates toward outsider characters, subcultures and niches, and weird, dark, challenging stories that are obsessive in content and craft. She primarily works with authors from underrepresented, marginalized and minoritized groups.

Ms. Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency LLC in New York, New York. Her agency is the largest African American owned agency in the country and has represented and established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Publishers Weekly nominated Regina Brooks as a PW Star Watch finalist, and Writer's Digest magazine named Serendipity Literary Agency as one of the top 25 literary agencies.

Known as the first literary agent to represent marginalized creators in the digital publishing space, Saritza (she/her/ella) is a self-proclaimed geek who loves escaping into worlds and stories from all walks of life. Her love of great storytelling is what has driven her work in the publishing industry for the past 18 years and her passion for amplifying queer and BIPOC voices is what continues to drive her today. An avid romance and science-fiction reader, and strong advocate of the LGBTQ+ community, she enjoys fresh voices in YA and adult genre fiction. She specializes in romance and young adult fiction by and for diverse audiences.

Serene Hakim (she/her) is an agent at Ayesha Pande Literary. Born to Lebanese immigrants in the Midwest, she grew up straddling cultures and languages and still feels like a third culture kid. Serene loves to read a variety of genres but is particularly drawn to fiction with strong female voices, both YA/MG and adult fiction and non-fiction with international themes, and LGBTQ and feminist issues. She is always on the lookout for great YA sci-fi and fantasy, realistic YA, and anything that gives voice to those whose voices are underrepresented and/or marginalized.

B. Sharise Moore is a New Jersey native, writer/educator, curriculum designer, and the Poetry Editor for FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. Her middle grade compendium, Fangs, Feathers, and Folklore: Africa’s Amazing Beasts is forthcoming from Algonquin Young Readers in 2023. Fatimah’s Fantastic City, her social justice picture book, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2025.

You can find her online at bsharisemoore.com, tweeting @sharise_b or on IG: @b.sharise.

Bix Gabriel (she/her) is a writer, teacher of creative writing at Bucknell University, editor at The Offing magazine, debut Periplus Fellow, co-founder of TakeTwo Services, occasional Tweeter, and seeker of the perfect jalebi. She has a M.F.A. in fiction from Indiana University-Bloomington, and her writing appears in the anthology A Map is Only One Story, on Longleaf Review, Catapult, Guernica, and Electric Literature, among others. Her debut novel, Archives of Amnesia, was a finalist for the 2021 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

Damitri Martinez (he/his) is a writer in Denver, Colorado. He won the 2020 PEN/Robert J Dau Prize for Emerging Writers and was a 2019 Lambda Fellow. His work has appeared in Foglifter Journal, where he is presently managing editor for prose fiction. He currently teaches creative writing to high school students in Denver.

Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. He runs the literary newsletter wust el-balad, on Substack. His debut chapbook, Red//Jild//Prayer won the 2017 Diode Editions Contest, and his second, Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo was published in 2022 by Half-Mystic Press. A Kundiman and Watering Hole Fellow, his writing has appeared, or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2020, The Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, Mubi Notebook, Reverse Shot, and Mizna.