Ilana Bean is an MFA candidate in University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, as well as a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship and Stanley Fellowship Award. Her work has appeared in The Science Museum of Virginia and Whurk Magazine. She is a nonfiction reader for The Iowa Review.

Monica Brashears is an MFA student at Syracuse University. She writes about Black Appalachia, good food, womanhood. She has more fiction in Split Lip Magazine and Appalachian Review, and she has recently finished her first novel. Some of Monica’s favorite things are as follows: fresh popcorn, full moons, and vanilla perfume. You can find her on Twitter (@magnoliasnmud)!

A Lambda Literary fellow, Michael Chang (they/them) was awarded the Kundiman Scholarship at the Miami Writers Institute. A finalist in contests at the Iowa Review, BOMB, NightBlock, & many others, their poems have been nominated for Best of the Net & the Pushcart Prize. Their full-length collection is forthcoming from Really Serious Literature. Other projects will soon be announced.

Krysta Lee Frost is a mixed race Filipino American poet who halves her life between the Philippines and the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, The Margins, Berkeley Poetry Review, Hobart, wildness, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

Jennifer Gauthier is a visual artist and Reiki master from Maple Valley, Washington. She earned her BA from Western Washington University in fine arts. She explores her connection to the land of the Pacific Northwest and her upbringing there through her work. She currently lives, paints and practices Reiki in Walla Walla, Washington.

K.A. Hays is the author of three books of poetry—Dear Apocalypse; Early Creatures, Native Gods; and Windthrow—all from Carnegie Mellon. A fourth book is forthcoming in 2022. Hays teaches at Bucknell University and lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Originally from Oklahoma, Tory Huff is an Iowa-based queer surrealist poet and MFA candidate at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Kelsey Kerin is a writer from St. Clair, Michigan. Her poetry has appeared in Midwest Review, where she won the 2020 Great Midwest Writing Contest. She is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Anna Leigh Knowles is the author of Conditions of The Wounded (forthcoming, University of Wisconsin Press 2021), selected by Natasha Trethewey. Her work appears in Blackbird, Indiana Review, Memorious, The Missouri Review Online, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, storySouth, Hunger Mountain, Sou’wester, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Tin House Online. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, she has also received scholarships from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, Bear River Writers’ Workshop, the New Harmony Writers’ Workshop, the San Miguel de Allende Writers’ Conference, and a Female Leadership Residency at Omega Institution. She worked as an assistant editor for the literary journals Copper Nickel and Crab Orchard Review. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a BA from University of Colorado-Denver. For more info please visit annalknowles.com.

McLeod Logue is a poet and artist born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington.

Erin Lynn is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, where she also teaches English, and where she was the recipient of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. She holds an MA in Irish Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast, and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Her work has been published in venues such as Narrative, Lunch Ticket, and Foothill Journal. She lives in Queens, NY and co-curates Poor Mouth Poetry in the Bronx.

Susannah B. Mintz is a Professor of English at Skidmore College. She has published extensively as a writer of creative nonfiction, with essays in American Literary Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Epiphany, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2014 South Loop National Essay Prize; finalist for the 2010 William Allen nonfiction prize, the Epiphany chapbook contest in 2015, and the 2019 Cagibi essay prize; and semi-finalist for the 2019 River Teeth nonfiction prize. Her work has received notable mention from Best American Essays 2010 and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2018. A short memoir titled “Match Dot Comedy” appeared as a Kindle Single in 2013. A specialist in disability studies and scholar of autobiography, she is also the author of four monographs, including Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (2007), Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body (2014), and The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction (Bloomsbury 2019), in addition to numerous articles and chapters. She is co-editor of three critical volumes on disability and life writing. A memoir called Love Affair in the Garden of Milton: Poetry, Loss, and the Meaning of Unbelief is forthcoming from LSU Press.

Erin Jin Mei O’Malley is a queer Asian American writer. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Redivider, wildness, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. They have received a scholarship from the Lambda Literary Foundation and nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can follow them @ebxydreambxy

Genevieve Payne holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was the 2019 recipient of the Leonard Brown Prize in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and RHINO.

Kaylie Saidin grew up in California and now lives in North Carolina, where she is an MFA candidate at UNC Wilmington. She serves as co-Fiction Editor at Ecotone Magazine. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Fourteen Hills, upstreet #15, Columbia Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, and elsewhere. 

Ross White is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the 2019 Sexton Prize, and two chapbooks. He is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and the editor of Four Way Review. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing, grammar, and podcasting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow him on Twitter: @rosswhite.

Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019) and is a 2019-2021 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Jim’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and Boston Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and lives in Oakland, California.

Liu Xingli was born in a small town called lake of water caltrop in Hubei, China. She now lives in Stockholm, Sweden. She is a system engineer in a telecom device company. She has published two short stories in Chinese literary magazines. She started to write poetry in Chinese and translate into English since 2020.