Airea Dee Matthews'  first collection of poems, Simulacra, won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was published by Yale University Press. She is currently Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. Matthews's writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Harvard Review, American Poet, Four Way Review, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, Best American Poetry 2015, and elsewhere. She was awarded a 2016 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, the 2016 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts award, as well as having formerly received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and The James Merrill House. 

Rachel McKibbens is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and author of three full-length books of poetry, blud, Into The Dark & Emptying Field, and Pink Elephant as well as the chapbook MAMMOTH. For four years McKibbens taught poetry through the Healing Arts Program at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan and continues to teach poetry and creative writing and give lectures across the country as an advocate for mental health awareness, gender-equality and victims of violence and domestic abuse. In 2012, McKibbens founded The Pink Door Writing Retreat, an annual retreat in the US open exclusively to women / trans / non-binary writers of color. McKibbens is a member of Latinas Unidas and co-curates the critically acclaimed reading series Poetry & Pie Night in upstate New York.

Casey Rocheteau  was born on Cape Cod, and raised as a sea witch. They are a poet, visual/sound artist and historian living in Detroit, Michigan. Winner of inaugural Write A House permanent residency in 2014, Rocheteau resides in a home they won with poems.They are a Callaloo Writer’s Workshop, Cave Canem, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellow and, a former Writer in Residence at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. In 2014, Rocheteau created the Shrine of the Black Medusa Tarot. They are the editor in chief of Heart Online Journal and their second poetry collection, The Dozen, was released on Sibling Rivalry Press in 2016. Their writing has appeared in Apogee, The American Academy of Poets, Day One, The Offing, LitHub, Barnes and Noble Review among others. Their visual art has been displayed at Cranbrook Museum of Art and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

 Morgan Mann Willis is named after a carryout on Georgia Avenue, in Washington DC, where she was born and raised. As a writer, creative strategist, facilitator and overall hustler, Morgan's writing spans genres, functions and forms. Morgan's work has been published in Razor Wire Women: Scholars, Prisoners and Activists, Dark Phrases Literary Magazine, and on a variety of blogs. In 2016, they edited the Lambda Literary Award-nominated anthology, Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity (Riverdale Ave Books). In 2017, Morgan was awarded the first ever Roxane Gay fellowship at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is currently writing her debut novel, Politics From Nowhere. Professionally, she just completed a six-year stint of coordinating the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, the realest city to ever do it.

Nandi Comer has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Arts, Cave Canem and Callaloo. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project (Wayne State University Press, 2014), Detroit Anthology (Rust Belt Chic Press, 2014), in Another and Another: An Anthology From the Grind Daily Writing Series (Bull City Press, 2012), Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Prairie Schooner Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Sycamore Review.

Anna Clark is a journalist living in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in ELLE Magazine, The New York Times, POLITICO Magazine, Next City, and other publications. She was a correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review as part of its United States Project, for nearly five years. Anna’s forthcoming book, The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, will be published in 2018 by Metropolitan Books.Anna was part of the 2017 class Knight-Wallace journalism fellows at the University of Michigan. She edited A Detroit Anthology, a 2015 Michigan Notable Book, and she is the author of Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden. She is the founder of Literary Detroit and has been the director of applications for Write A House, which renovates longtime vacant homes in Detroit and gives them away to writers. She was also a writer-in-residence in Detroit high schools through the InsideOut Literary Arts Project for four years. She has been a longtime co-leader of an improv theater workshop at a men’s prison in Macomb County, Michigan.