FAYLITA HICKS (she/they) is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the forthcoming poetry collection A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), and the debut memoir about their carceral experiences A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2025). They are the recipient of fellowships, grants, and residencies from Art for Justice, Black Mountain Institute, the Tony-Award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Lambda Literary, Texas After Violence Project, Tin House, and the Right of Return USA. A voting member of the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs, Hicks’ poetry, essays, and digital art have been published in or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, Slate, The Slowdown Podcast, Yale Review, amongst others.

PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS is the author of Mutiny, winner of the 2022 American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn. Williams’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.

NASEEM JAMNIA (they/them) is a Persian-Chicagoan, former neuroscientist, and the Judith A. Markowitz award-winning author of The Bruising of Qilwa (Tachyon Publications, 2022), which was shortlisted for IAFA's Crawford Award and the Locus Award, and the upcoming Sleepaway (Aladdin, 2025). Their work has appeared in The Washington Post, Bitch Media, Cosmopolitan, The Rumpus, The Writer's Chronicle, and other venues. A Lambda Literary, Otherwise, and the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellow, Naseem is the managing editor at Sword & Kettle Press, a tiny publishing house of feminist speculative writing. Find out at more at www.naseemwrites.com or on Instagram @jamsternazzy.

ANNELL LÓPEZ is a Dominican immigrant. She is the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason, forthcoming in 2024 from the Feminist Press. A 2022 Peter Taylor fellow, her work has received support from Tin House and the Kenyon Review Workshops and has appeared in American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. López is an Assistant Fiction Editor for New Orleans Review and an MFA candidate at the University of New Orleans. She is working on a novel.

REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country.

AIREA D. MATTHEWS is the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate.

A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, KEN LIU 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.

ELISABET VELASQUEZ is a Brooklyn Born Boricua. She is a mother of two. She is the author of When We Make It (Dial Books, 2021). She is the winner of Button Poetry's 2017 Poetry Video Contest. Her work is forthcoming in WHAT SAVES US Poems of Empathy and Outrage In The Age Of Trump edited by Martin Espada.

PATRICE GAINES’ autobiography, Laughing in the Dark, details her journey from heroin user and abused woman to award-winning journalist and good mother. She is also author of Moments of Grace, which outlines her path to change. Patrice was a reporter at the Washington Post for 16 years. She is a justice advocate and abolitionist who believes crime can be reduced without depending on the mass incarceration of human beings.