Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.

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. For more than twenty-years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of paper-making. 

Betts won the 2019 National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his NY Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

 

Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping which won the 2014 New Issues Poetry Book Prize selected by Fannie Howe. He teaches creative writing at Morgan State University.

Native Washington DC Bard and Barrister, Brian Gilmore is the author of four books of poetry including 'come see about me marvin (Wayne State University Press), a Michigan Notable Book selection for 2020.

Alan King is a multidisciplinary artist and author of three collections of poetry. He lives with his family in Bowie, MD.

Kateema Lee is the author of three chapbooks. Her full collection, Transcript of the Unnamed, explores joy, identity, violence, and the “brief, bright lives” of missing and forgotten black women in Washington, DC.

Steven Leyva is the author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, is forthcoming from Blair Publishing in Spring 2025.

Jadi Z. Omowale is a poet and fiction writer. Her most recent publication is The Goddess in the Girl, a poetry collection. Her poem “Diagnosis-the Suga” was recently published in The Common Language Project: Ascent, 2024.

Alexa Patrick is the author of Remedies for Disappearing (Haymarket Books, 2023). In spring 2023, Alexa made her stage debut as Un/Sung in the opera We Shall Not Be Moved, (dire. Bill T. Jones).

An NEA and Cave Canem fellow, Lauren Russell is the author of three books of poetry, including A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024), and Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award.

S. Shaw is the author of The House of Men: poems, as well his poems have been published in African American Review, Split This Rock, Rhino 2021, Rattle Literary Journal, Taint Taint Taint Journal, Evergreen and Obsidian, as well as having a short story in Mighty Real: An Anthology of African American Same Gender Loving Writing.