Holly Bass is a socially-engaged artist working across multiple disciplines including dance, theater, visual art and writing. She has collaborated with governmental agencies, cultural institutions, nonprofit organizations and academic communities to create innovative artistic experiences that foster connection among groups of strangers. Her artwork can be found in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. She is a Cave Canem fellow (‘97-’99) and was a founding member of DC WritersCorps which sent her into schools, community centers and women’s shelters to teach poetry workshops. She received a 2024 Washington Award for art and social justice. She is currently the 2025-2026 Witt Visiting Artist at the University of Michigan, and a 2025-2026 Fellow with UM’s Center for Racial Justice.

Born in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in Baltimore, poet and writer Reginald Harris won the 2012 Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for Autogeography (2013).

makalani bandele is an Affrilachian Poet & Cave Canem fellow that works with language as one way to broaden people’s imagination and worldview.

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union and Haint. She’s been awarded the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize, the 2019  Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, the 2017 Ohioana Poetry Award and the Maryland State Art Grant individual artist awardee.

Hayes Davis’ first volume, Let Our Eyes Linger was published by Poetry Mutual Press and his poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals. Hayes recently began serving as the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at The Park School of Baltimore; he shares his creative and domestic life with his wife, poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis, and their children.

Stacy Nathaniel Jackson is a trans writer, poet, playwright, and visual artist originally from Los Angeles.

Alan King is a husband, father, author, photographer, and videographer. He's also the author of Crooked Smiling Light, Point Blank, and DRIFT.

Kateema Lee is the author of three chapbooks: Almost Invisible, Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer, and Mundane Things. Her full collection, Transcript of the Unnamed, explores joy, identity, violence, and the “brief, bright lives” of missing and forgotten Black women in Washington, D.C.

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. . He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish, author of The Understudy’s Handbook, and author of The Opposite of Cruelty.

Sacha Marvin is a writer, performer and urban designer from Tidewater, Virginia. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, Marvin has been a finalist or received awards in Poetry, Acting, Urban Planning, Playwriting, and Screenwriting.

Lauren Russell is the author of three books, including A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and Descent (Tarpaulin Sky, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award. An NEA and Cave Canem fellow, she teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Malik Thompson is a queer African-American writer from Washington, DC. His work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, the Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and residencies from organizations including Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, the Anderson Center, and Monson Arts