Wo Chan, who performs as The Illustrious Pearl, is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.

Omotara James is an artist, editor and educator, based in New York City. She is the author of Song of My Softening (Alice James Books, 2023). Her work has received support from various organizations, including the African Poetry Book Fund, New York Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary, and Cave Canem Foundation.

Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus, which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd. His poems and translations have appeared in African American Review; The American Poetry Review; Callaloo; Literary Imagination; Poem­-A-Day; Poetry; and Tongue—among other journals and anthologies. Micheaux’s honors include the Oscar Wilde Award, the Ambit Poetry Prize, and fellowships from The New York Times Foundation and Cave Canem Foundation, where he currently serves as Director of Programs.

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award. His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Recent poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. He is an assistant professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University.

Deborah Paredez is a poet, scholar, and cultural critic. She is the author of the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), winner of the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Book Award and a New York Times "New and Notable Poetry Book." She is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization dedicated to Latinx poets and poetry. Her book of literary nonfiction, American Diva, is forthcoming in 2024 from Norton.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, the 2021 Granum Foundation Prize, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial and Poetry International Prizes, as well as fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, MacDowell, the National Endowment and New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018 and 2021. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.