Tonya Foster, Jenna Lê,
Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in the High Court (Belladonna*, 2015) and co-editor (with of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Callaloo, The Hat, Western Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, Lungfull, and other journals. A recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Magnet Fellowship, and a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, she is currently a doctoral candidate in the English Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She lives in Harlem.
Jenna Lê is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, and translations appear or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, The Best of the Raintown Review, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Le is a second-generation Vietnamese-American, born and raised just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MD from Columbia University and works as a radiologist at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Learn more at jennalewriting.com.
Rosanna Oh has had her essays and poetry appear in Best New Poets, Unsplendid, 32 Poems, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Originally from Long Island, she lives and writes in New York.
Stephen S. Mills is the author of A History of the Unmarried (Sibling Rivalry, 2014) and He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle and winner of the 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, PANK, The New York Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Knockout, Assaracus, The Rumpus, and others. Stephen won the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for his poem entitled “Iranian Boys Hanged for Sodomy, July 2005,” which appeared in the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press, 2009), edited by Robert L Giron. He lives in New York City.
Camille Rankine is the author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Her chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire was selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a finalist for The Poetry Foundation’s 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, Camille was featured as an emerging poet in the fall 2010 issue of American Poet and the April 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Narrative, Paper Darts, A Public Space and Tin House. Camille earned her BA from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony and was named an Honorary Cave Canem fellow in 2012. She is Assistant Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College and lives in New York City.
Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, Nicole’s prizes and awards include a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the 2014 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a 2013 Daniel Varoujan Award and the 2012 Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. Nicole is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation and lives in Brooklyn.
Tom Capelonga is a 27-year-old native of New York City. His poems have appeared in FourTwoNine Magazine, Podium, and the HIV Here & Now Project.
Debora Lidov is the author of Trance (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Ars Medica, Cut Throat, Five Points, Salamander, upstreet, and The Threepenny Review. Debora is a medical social worker and lives in Brooklyn.
Syreeta McFadden is a columnist for Feministing, a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian US, editor of the online literary journal Union Station Magazine, and co-curator of the poetry and public art experiment Poets in Unexpected Places. Here essays and journalism have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, BuzzFeed Ideas, NPR’s Code Switch and This Week’s Must Read, Fusion, Talking Points Memo, and Poets & Writers. Syreeta teaches writing, literature and humanities to community college kids in the New York area.