Poets and Presenters 2022

Ralph Adamo's eighth poetry book, All the Good Hiding Places (Black Widow Press), was published in 2020, just in time for the pandemic to drop a wet blanket over such non-essential products. His seventh collection, Ever: Poems 2000-2014, was published by Lavender Ink. Previous volumes include Waterblind: New and Selected Poems (2002), and two of Lost Roads’ Publishers’ earliest books, Sadness at the Private University (1977) and The End of the World (1979. He also edited the selected poems of Everette Maddox (I Hope It's Not Over and Goodbye, UNO Press, 2009), and recently wrote the preface for the collected poems of John Stoss, Nobody Loves Me (Lavender Ink 2022). Among his awards are an LEA Individual Artist Grant in 1998, and a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. He was an editor of Barataria in the '70s and New Orleans Review in the '90s. He is Professor of English at Xavier University, where he has taught since 2007, and where he also edits Xavier Review and Xavier Review Press.

Edith Adams is a literary translator from Spanish into English. She is currently completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Translators Conference, the Kenyon Review Literary Translation Workshop, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. She is currently translating Daniela Catrileo's poetry collection Guerra florida into English, an excerpt of which is forthcoming in the Winter 2022 issue of Northwest Review. 

Antonio Addessi is a poet and writer living in New York City. He received his BA in English from the University of Maine(’15) and his MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from Columbia University(’20). You can find his debut full length book of poetry, published by Rebel Satori Press, at http://rebelsatori.com/product/sleeptalking 

Ashanti Anderson (she/her) is a Black Queer Disabled poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Her debut short poetry collection, Black Under, is the winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in World Literature Today, POETRY magazine, and elsewhere in print and on the web. Learn more about Ashanti’s previous & latest shenanigans at ashanticreates.com.

Tom Andes has published fiction in Witness, Natural Bridge, the Akashic Books Mondays Are Murder Flash Fiction Blog, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and elsewhere. He frequently writes reviews for publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Rumpus. A graduate of Loyola University New Orleans and San Francisco State University, he has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale. He lives in New Orleans, where he works as a freelance editor and teaches community writing classes at the Loyola Writing Institute.

Anna Bagoly is a Hungarian-American MA student in Poetry at USM, and is fascinated with recreating memories that immerse in sensation and imagery, blending poetry and creative nonfiction. They’ve been published in dead peasant, WinglessDreamer, won the Memorial Fellowship at Heavy Feather Review, and recorded a piece with the Mississippi Coalition Against Sexual Assault. 

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest as well as Terrain.org’s 10th Annual Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2018, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and a BA from Rutgers University, and currently teaches creative writing online at The Poetry Barn & The Loft. Visit her online at www.staceybalkun.com. 

Kathleen Balma is the author of the poetry collection FROM YOUR HOSTESS AT THE T&A MUSEUM (Black Spring Press Group, 2022). A Fulbright fellow and a Pushcart Prize winner, she is the recipient of scholarships from Sewanee Writers' Conference and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a commendation from the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, and a fellowship from Rivendell Writers' Colony. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Ecotone, the Montreal International Poetry Prize Global Poetry Anthology, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Verse Daily, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She works at New Orleans Public Library.

Aicha Bassry’s numerous poetry collections include; Masā’āt (2001, Evenings); Araq al-Malā’ikah (2002, Engels’ Insomnia), Shurfah Muṭfa’ah (2004, A Dark Balcony), Laylah Sarī‘at al-‘Aṭab (2007, A Frail Night), Sadiqī al-Kharīf (2009, My Friend Fall), and  Khulwat al-Ṭayr (2010, The Bird’s Seclusion). Hadīth Midfa’ah (2012, Fireplace Chat). She is also the author of four novels: Layālī al-Ḥarīr (2013, Silk Nights, translated as Noches de seda, 2016), Hafīdāt Greta Garbo (2015, Greta Garbo’s Granddaughters), Banāt al-Karaz (2017, The Cherry Tree Girls), al-Ḥayāt min dūnī (2018, Life Without Me), and Ka Juthah fī Riwāyah Būlīsiah (2020, Like a Corpse in a Detective Story).

Bassry was awarded the Kateb Yacine Novel Prize (2016) for Hafīdāt Greta Garbo (2016, Greta Garbo’s Granddaughters), the Simone Landry Women’s Poetry Prize (2017) and Best Arab Novel award at the 37th edition of the Sharjah International Book Fair (2018) for her novel al-Ḥayāt min dūnī (2006, Life Without Me). Her work has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish.

Steve Bellin-Oka earned his MFA from the University of Virginia and his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. His first book of poems, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, won the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and will be published in February 2020 by the University of North Texas Press. He is also the author of two chapbooks, Out of the Frame (Walls Divide Press, 2019) and Dead Letter Office at North Atlantic Station (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017). The recipient of a 2019-2020 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Steve has also received fellowships from Yaddo, the National Parks Arts Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Arts. He currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. www.steve-bellin-oka.com

Ellie Black is a poet, screenwriter, critic, and essayist originally from Arkansas. She's currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, where she also received her MFA. Her poetry can be found in or is forthcoming from Mississippi Review, Poetry Online, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Her prose can be found in the Georgia Review, Pleaides, Fandom Spotlite, and the Adroit Journal. She has received awards and honors from the C.D. Wright Women Writer's Conference, Split Lip Magazine, the Poets' Roundtable of Arkansas, the University of Mississippi, Hendrix College, Bucknell University, and the Austin Film Festival.

NOPF co-founder Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press. She co-hosted the 17 Poets! Literary Series from 2002-2012 and hosted the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series from 2013-2019 in New Orleans as well as founded The Dragonfly performance space in 2018. She is the co-founder of the New Orleans Poetry Festival. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Trickhouse, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has four books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013), Commitment (2015) and BASIC PROGRAMMING (2018) published by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks: Dollbaby (Horseless Press, 2013) and i always wanted to start over (Nous-Zot Press, 2014). Horse Less Press released her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me, in 2016. Her fifth book PLURALITY is forthcoming in 2023. 

Allison Campbell is the author of the illustrated prose poetry collection Encyclopédie of the Common & Encompassing. Her work has appeared in such places as Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Witness, and Rattle. She’s been a contributing reviewer for Raintaxi and written for Best American Poetry’s website. She lives in New Orleans and teaches creative writing at The Willow School.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019). Two of her books have been reprinted, Discount Fireworks by Doubleback books in 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2d9zenxr and Reading Berryman to the Dog ( Belle Point Press, 2023). Her chapbook length entry in Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry is out now from Cornerpost Press. See other work in print and online and at her website www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com. 

Christopher Carmona is the author of El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande, which was a finalist for the 2019 Best Young Adult Novel for the Texas Institute of Letters and The Road to Llorona Park, which won the 2016 NACCS Tejas Best Fiction Award and was listed as one of the top 8 Latinx books in 2016 by NBCNews. He has three books of poetry: 140 Twitter Poems, I Have Always Been Here and beat. He co-edited The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writings with Chuck Taylor and Rob Johnson and Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World with Rossy Evelin Lima. He has also co-written Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Poetics. Currently, he is working on Chispas: Poems and also working on the El Rinche series of novels. Book Two is out now.

Daniela Catrileo (b. Santiago, 1987) is a writer and a professor of philosophy. She is a member of the Colectivo Mapuche Rangiñtulewfü and part of the editorial team for Yene, a digital magazine featuring art, writing, and critical thought from across Wallmapu and the Mapuche diaspora. She has published the  following collections of poetry: Río herido (2016) and Guerra florida (2018); the chapbooks: El territorio del viaje (2017, 2022) and Las aguas dejaron de unirse a otras aguas (2020): and a book of short stories: Piñen (2019). Her other projects explore artistic formats such as performance, video art and sound-visual poetry, among them: Maripura warangka küla pataka mari meli:18.314 (2018), Llekümün (2020), La escritura del río (2021) and Weludungun (2022).

Poet and multimedia artist Rocío Cerón is based in Mexico City. Her work transits between artistic languages ​​(poetry, music, body and image) creating transmedia pieces. Her pieces have been showed at international venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Southbank Centre, London, Modern Art Museum, Mexico, Cervantes Institutes of Berlin, London and Stockholm; beside many others. She has released the sound poetry album Sonic Bubbles (2020); and published the poetry collections Spectio (2019), Borealis (2016), Nudo vortex(2015), and Diorama (2012). These last title, Diorama, was translated by Anna Rosenwong and won the Best Translated Book Award 2015, awarded by the University of Rochester. She has also been awarded with the National Award of Literature Gilberto Owen 2000 (Mexico), the See America Travel Award 2005 (US) and has been one of the 25 artists selected for the Image Center, Photography Biennial 2021 at the Image Center in Mexico. Her poems have been translated into English and diverse European languages. She is part of the National System of Art Creators of México (SNCA) since 2010. Follow her creative process in www.instagram.com/laobservante/ and read/hear/see her work in www.rocioceron.com

Mary Leauna Christensen has lived in southwest deserts, in kudzo-infested Appalachia, the PNW, and currently resides in Mississippi. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi. Mary is Managing Editor of The Swamp Literary Magazine. Her work can be found in Permafrost, Driftwood Press, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Sugar House Review, among others.

Lucinda Clark is poet, publisher and film producer. She is the founder of the Poetry Matters Project which was her proudest achievement until she produced her first  short film with her son last year. Check out, Black People Don't Tango, on Youtube.

Clark is a contributor of View From The Middle of the Road Series and publisher of Poetry Diversified An Anthology of Human Experience Series.She is also completing her tenure as the first African American female President of the Georgia Poetry Society.She loves working with One Book One New Orleans and TRIP internship program. When not organizing poetry events or writing, Clark can be found dancing tango, or meandering in her garden. 

Sarah Koken Colón is a poet, writer, and educator from the American West. She spent her childhood in a New Religious Movement in Southwestern Montana, which led to her study and exploration of religion, faith, and the traumas imposed by belief systems. Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Account, Swamp Ape Review, and The Examined Life, among others. She currently lives with her husband and their blended family of six children in Largo, Florida. 

LGBTQ+ writer, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy is the author of "Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder" (winner of the Stevens Manuscript Prize), "A Sentimental Hairpin" (published by Tolsun Books), and "Greenest Grass " (winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize).  Conroy has also co-authored a micro-chapbook with Donna Spruijt-Metz, titled "And Haunt the World".  Her/their work has/will appear in American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, New England Review and other journals.

Peter Cooley was Director of Creative Writing at Tulane from 1975 -2018 and is now Professor Emeritus. He has published ten books of poetry, nine of them with Carnegie Mellon and his most recent is WORLD WITHOUT FINISHING, 2018.   The Poetry Editor of NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW FROM 1970-2000, he is now Poetry Editor of CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE. He was Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2015-2017.

Natalie Corthésy is a Jamaican poet and the 2020 Winner of The Caribbean Writer’s Marvin E. Williams Literary Prize for a new or emerging writer for “The Helper Experiment” published in The Caribbean Writer Volume 34 under the theme, Dignity, Power and Place in the Caribbean Space. She is also the recipient of many awards in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s National Festival of the Arts Creative Writing Competition. Natalie’s work has been published in the Daily Gleaner, The Carimac Times, We Are Goodenough Magazine, Interviewing the Caribbean and The Caribbean Writer. She is a Calabash International Literary Festival Poetry Workshop fellow and a contributor to the anthology: So Much Things to Say 100 Poets from the First Ten Years of the Calabash International Literary Festival, edited by Kwame Dawes and Colin Channer (Akashic Books 2010). Her first anthology Fried Green Plantains (Nasara Publishing 2017) is a delightful recipe of poems, inviting the reader to sample visual images of an authentic Jamaican landscape. The perception of the vestiges of colonisation, and the imagery of an emerging urban Jamaican society, are sometimes jarring, but always profoundly honest and relatable. Prof Mervyn Morris, former Poet Laureate of Jamaica, describes her second anthology Sky Juice (Ian Randle Publishers 2021) as "carefully crafted poems, which wittily acknowledge Jamaican privilege and celebrate our popular culture, feminine identity is a central concern. The persona, identified as ‘a browning’, is recalling childhood and later events; reviewing dreams, desire, disappointment, sex and love. Sky Juice is distinctive work, an attractive collection". Natalie lives and works in Kingston as a Senior Lecturer at The University of the West Indies, Mona. www.skyjuicebooklaunch.com

Lucas de Lima is the author of Wet Land (Action Books) and Tropical Sacrifice, forthcoming this spring from Birds LLC. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canada Council for the Arts, de Lima holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Their writing has appeared in PEN Poetry, Poetry Foundation, boundary2, Syndicate, Brooklyn Rail, and anthologies pertaining to avant-garde and ecopoetics.

Jesse DeLong teaching composition and literature and Louisiana State University. His debut, The Amateur Scientist's Notebook, was published by Baobab Press. Other work has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. His chapbooks, Tearings, and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press. He tweets @jessemdelong

Recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ 2021 Wallace Stevens Award and the Poetry Society’s 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, Toi Derricotte is the author of 2019 National Book Awards Finalist I: New & Selected Poems, She co-founded Cave Canem with Cornelius Eady in 1996.   

Claire Dougherty is from Stockton, CA and is currently based in LA. Her poems have been published in Fence, Second Factory, and RECLINER, which she co-edits. 

Ry Dunn is a poet and artist living in Brooklyn, NY. He and Becca Teich curate the reading series Desperate Living, in Brooklyn, since 2020. His work can be found in the Poetry Project’s Recluse, and a chapbook from g.l.o.s.s. press titled Failure & Forgetting 

Gina Ferrara lives and writes in New Orleans.  She has five poetry collections including her latest, Amiss.  Her work has appeared in numerous journals including The Southern Review, The Poetry Ireland Review and Tar River Poetry and was selected for publication in the Sixty-Four Best Poets of 2019 by Black Mountain Press.  Since 2007, she has curated The Poetry Buffet, a monthly reading series in New Orleans.  She teaches English and writing at Delgado Community College and is editor of the New Orleans Poetry Journal Press. 

ray ferreira: a performer of sorts. She is a blaqlatina from occupied Lenape lands called New York, NY: the illegitimate EEUU. Another spacetimemattering/materialdiscusive (dis)continuity: [a n o t h e r a r c h i p e l a g o] the Caribbean>the Greater Antilles>Hispañola>the Dominican Republic [a n o t h e r a r c h i p e l a g o] Corona>Queens>Brooklyn>Lenapehoking She stays playin, showing work at the Little Island, Performance Space New York, Queens Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Wendy's Subway and The Knockdown Center. She also received an MFA from Hunter College.

Norman Fischer is a poet, essayist, and Zen Buddhist priest. His latest of more than twenty-five prose and poetry titles include There was a clattering as... (Lavender Ink), Men in Suits (BlazeVox), the serial poems Untitled Series: Life As It Is (Talisman House). His latest prose works are When You Greet Me I Bow, The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path and Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language and Religion. He is the founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation (www.everydayzen.org), a network of Zen meditation groups and other projects.

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She's the author of Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021) and A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat, 2022). With Andrea Abi-Karam she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She lives in Queens.

Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Kenning JP García is a diarist, humorist, and antipoet. García is also the author of With (Really Serious Literature) as well as an editor at Rigorous and Dream Pop Press. 

Charles Garrett is a writer and father of two travelers of the ethereal plane. They keep him guessing at their past lives, with early morning risings and song from here or there. 

He is presently finishing up, what he considers his Holy Trinity: 

His novel, Mansavage in Deadhorse.

His collection of poetry, Articulate: The Rise.

His stage play, The Lottery.

Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Sunder Press. An indie journal. 

www.sunderpress.com 

www.instagram.com/Charlesclaudelgarrett

https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-garrett-5082376b

Katherine Gibbel is a poet whose work has been published in the Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Second Factory, and elsewhere. She edits and prints Send Me Press. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Windsor, Vermont. Her chapbook Prairie was published by Ethel Press in 2020.

Sara Gilmore is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and holds an MFA in comparative literature—literary translation. She teaches poetry at the University of Iowa as one of the 2022–2023 CLAS Visiting Writers and serves as senior literary editor for the Iowa Prison Writing Project. She presently resides in Iowa City with her young son, but lived for seventeen years outside the United States—in that sense, she calls a number of places and identities home. Her work has appeared in Ugly Duckling Presse's Second Factory and Annulet: A Journal of Poetics.

Henry Goldkamp (he/they) is an experimental poet and interdisciplinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between poetry, visual art, and community performance through public installations of intermedia, such as an olfactory poem "read" through the nose (SUMMERTIMER, 2023), immersive clown utilizing audience participation (Balloon Animal, 2023), a grove of trees in which thousands of poems were hung for passersby to pluck and then mail to strangers out of a phonebook (The Poetree Project, 2014), and a citywide installation of 60+ typewriters—resulting in the first ever book to be composed by a city (What the Hell Is Saint Louis Thinking? 2013). By creating such spaces of dialogue and interactive expression, he encourages participants to connect with each other and their shared environment.

He lives in New Orleans, where he co-runs The Splice Poetry Series, acts as intermedia editor for the small press Tilted House, and teaches at Louisiana State University. Art and criticism appear in Indiana Review, Best New Poets 2021, Denver Quarterly, Works & Days, Accelerants, Volt, Triquarterly, Tyger Quarterly, Bat City Review (winner of the 2022 Hybrid Prize), Afternoon Visitor, DIAGRAM, and Annulet, among others. His public art projects have been covered by NPR's Morning Edition and Time and he was recently an artist-in-residence at Mary Sky in Vermont.

Emily M. Goldsmith (she/they) is a queer Cajun poet originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They received their BA in Creative Writing-Poetry at Louisiana State University and their MFA in Creative-Writing-Poetry at the University of Kentucky. They are currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Mississippi in the Center for Writers. Their work has appeared in Fifth Wheel Press, Hecate Mag, Pile Press, Witch Craft Mag, Fine Print Press and elsewhere.

You can find them on Twitter at @emilymgoldsmith and on Instagram at @emily.mgoldsmith. Their website is http://www.emilymgoldsmith.com/. 

Maggie Graber (she/her/hers) is a queer poet from the Great Lakes and the author of Swan Hammer (Michigan State University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and a 2023 nominee for best poetry collection from Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Her work has been published in The Louisville Review, RHINO, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. A former poetry editor of Yalobusha Review, she currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she's a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. Find her online at maggiegraber.com.

Marina Greenfeld is a poet from southwest Florida and central North Carolina. Her work has been published by The South Carolina Review, Plainsongs, 86 Logic, Brooklyn Poets, and others. She is an MFA student in poetry at the University of Mississippi.

David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence, forthcoming from Driftwood Press. He’s a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA from UMass Amherst. His poems have appeared, or will soon, in places like Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Prelude, and others.

Carolyn Hembree's third collection, For Today, was published by LSU Press in 2024 as part of their Barataria Series. She is also the author of Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague (Trio House Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Trio Award and the 2015 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, and Skinny (Kore Press, 2012). She received a 2016-2017 ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents and has also received grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. A professor in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans, she was awarded the 2017 International Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award. Carolyn serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine. 

Jaime Luis Huenún Villa was born in 1967 in Valdivia, southern Chile. He is an award-winning Mapuche-Huilliche poet whose books include Ceremonias (1999), Puerto Trakl (2001), Reducciones (2012), Fanon City Meu (2014), and La calle Maldestam y otros territorios apócrifos (2016), and Ceremonia de los nombres / Kawiñtun Üyelüwün Mew (2021). His latest collection of poetry, Crónicas de la Nueva Esperanza / Chronicles of New Hope, is forthcoming in a bilingual edition from Lom Ediciones in Santiago, Chile.

He has received numerous awards, including the Pablo Neruda Prize (2003), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and the Chilean National Council on Arts and Culture’s Best Work of Literature 2013, for Reducciones, and the Jorge Teillier Prize (2020).

He has also edited several anthologies of Mapuche and other Latin American Indigenous poetry, including Epu mari ülkatufe ta fachantü: 20 poetas mapuche contemporáneos (Lom, 2003). Two of his books are available in English translation: Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008) and Fanon City Meu (Diálogos, 2018). Huenún currently lives in Santiago, where he works in the Chilean Ministry of Culture’s Department of Intercultural Studies.

MC Hyland (she/they) is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress. MC is the author of two full-length books of poems: THE END (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010) and a forthcoming book of short essays, The Dead and the Living and the Bridge (Meekling Press 2025). They have also published over a dozen poetry chapbooks/artist books. Holding MFAs in Creative Writing and Book Arts from the University of Alabama and a PhD in English Literature from NYU, MC lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Z’étoile Imma is a scholar, teacher, and poet of Haitian descent. Her scholarly work has been published in Callaloo, Research in African Literatures, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Agenda, and other academic journals. Her creative work has been published in The Brooklyn Review, African Voices, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, and most recently, Je Transporte Des Explosifs On Les Appelle Des Mots: Poesie Et Feminismes Aux Etats-Unis. She has studied poetry with Sonia Sanchez, Cheryl Clarke, and June Jordan. Dr. Imma earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Virginia and is currently the Michael S. Field Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Tulane University, where she is also affiliated with the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She is currently at work on two projects--a scholarly book that studies the archive of Black queer life in South Africa and a collection of poems that explores Black embodiment, memory, and the migration cultures of the Haitian Diaspora. Z’étoile Imma lives with her loves in New Orleans.

Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her chapbook A Faster Grave won the 2019 Antenna Prize. Her work has been a finalist for the 2023 Iowa Review Poetry Award, the RATTLE Poetry Prize, the RHINO Founders' Prize, and in 2021 she received the AWP Intro Journals Award. Skye's work was also selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. In 2022, she won the KGB Open Mic Contest in New York City, and served as the Writer-In-Residence at the Key West Literary Seminar in Florida. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Libre, will be published in the summer of 2024 by Regalo Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster. She currently teaches at Xavier University. 

Kamikaze Jones is a writer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work often explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and ritualized erotic transcendence. His recent practice has been focused on cultivating both sonic and sculptural sanctuary for the ghosts of public sex. A 2021 Wave Farm Artist-In-Residence, his work has been featured by The Poetry Project, Wussy Magazine, Montez Press Radio, Third Coast International Audio Festival, Constellations, and Nightboat Resonance. He is a co-founder of The Anchoress Syndicate, a poetry and performance collective that produces My Smutty Valentine, an annual event that foregrounds queer excess, play, and mutual aid.

​Jessica Kinnison's work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Phoebe, Entropy, Juked, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In April 2020, she was listed among eight New Orleans poets to watch in POETS & WRITERS. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop and host of the Dogfish Reading Series in New Orleans. She holds an MFA from Chatham University in Pittsburgh where she taught at the Allegheny County Jail.

Zachary Kluckman is an award-winning poet who has been recognized for his performance, writing, and mentorship in poetry. With numerous poems appearing in print worldwide, as well as many appearances across the country, Kluckman was recognized as the fifth highest ranked slam poet in the nation at the Blackberry Peach National Poetry Slam. His work has been featured online in multiple formats. He is the author of the poetry collections, The Animals in Our Flesh (Red Mountain Press, 2012), Some of It is Muscle (Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC, 2013) and the forthcoming Rearview Funhouse (Eyewear Publishing, 2022)  

Shiv Kotecha is the author of two books—The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now Books, 2015)—and his criticism appears publications such as 4Columns, Aperture, art-agenda, MUBI’s Notebook, BOMB, and frieze, where he is a contributing editor. 

Whiting Award winner Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn (Pitt Poetry Series, 2015), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery award, and the PEN/Osterweil Award. It was named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry books by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions. Individual poems have appeared widely, including Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry; have been anthologized in Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers Speak of Palestine, Bettering American Poetry, and Prospect.3's art catalogue Notes for Now. Their poems have been translated into Arabic, Spanish and Ukrainian.

Laurentiis is the inaugural fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics, as well as a Lannan Fellow.

In a conversation with poet Solmaz Sharif, when asked what they perceived as their “duty” as a poet, Laurentiis said, “I think my duty is pitched toward the past (the dead) and toward the future (the not-yet-born). Paradoxically, this means I must be explicitly, deeply, critically moored to the present. I think of a description of the poem you often mention, but I forget the attribution: about poems functioning as either 'diagnostic' or 'curative.' I find I lean toward the former, which means to face and acknowledge all of the past, brutal or otherwise. And I lean this way towards hoping, in a future, that my poems, however contaminated they may very well be, may approach the latter.“

Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, They received their MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where he was a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow, and his Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where he read literature and queer theory. They live in New Orleans.

NOPF co-founder Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. My ID, his eleventh book of poetry, was published by BlazeVOX in October, 2019. His novel trilogy, Three Letters, (comprised of Q, Little A, and The Private I) was released in 2021 by Spuyten Duyvil. His verse memoir, Memory Wing, called by Rodger Kamentetz "a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece," was published by Black Widow in 2011. A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 and translated into Spanish by Enrique Solinas and Peter Thompson; the bilingual edition was released by Yauguru in Uruguay as surrealismo in 2017. Essays, fiction, poem-like objects and other ephemera appear regularly in Xavier Review, Fell Swoop, Southern Review, Jacket2 and other such print and online journals. 

He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. Lavender Ink/Diálogos now has more than 200 books in print.

Read an interview with Bill about his poetics and about the press at Jacket2, or visit his Amazon author page.

He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (i.e. this).

Daniel W.K. Lee is the author of the collection of poetry Anatomy of Want (QueerMojo/Rebel Satori Press, 2019). He is a third generation refugee, queer, and of Cantonese descent. His work as also appeared in various online and print publications, including most recently South Dakota Review, Foglifter, Queer Aesthetics, RFD, LMNL Anthology (2022-2023), and others. Daniel lives in New Orleans with Camden, his head-turning whippet. Find out more about Daniel at www.danielwklee.com.

Lana Lehpamer
@makni_se
Zagreb, Croatia

Lana Lehpamer is  an MA art student at the Academy of fine arts in Zagreb, She is  interested in working with words and poetry but also  illustrations and abstract paintings as well as performances, audio and video art. Some of her work can be found here( https://issuu.com/home/published/sometimes_i_forget). In 2021. her poem has been published by Grime Prophet Mag, and a publication of two poems by Ugly Duckling Presse and Sky Island Journal is due in Spring 2022.

Phil Linz was born in Brooklyn, NY and has lived in several cities across the United States, including New Orleans, Tucson and Los Angeles.  He began writing poetry in 1971 and is founder and publisher of Fierce Grace Press, which specializes in chapbooks, believing in the concept of “Publishing Under the Radar.”   His most recent book is The Chapbooks:  Collected Poems, on Amazon, covering eight self-published and two unpublished chapbooks.  Mr. Linz currently lives in Wilmington, DE and continues to publish, both in print & online. See jerryazzmusician.com for several of his online poems.  He may be reached at  linzp18@verizon.net.

Ian U Lockaby is a poet, translator, and editor of the online journal mercury firs. He's the author of Defensible Space/if a crow— (Omnidawn Publishing) and A Seam of Electricity (Ghost Proposal). Recent work appears in journals such as Ecotone, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, FENCE, and West Branch. He lives in New Orleans.

Dylan Loring is a poet from Des Moines, Iowa.  He received his BA at the University of Iowa, his MFA at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently working on his PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches literature.  Dylan's poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, the minnesota review, Split Lip Magazine, and Forklift, Ohio, among other journals.

J.S. Makkos is a writer, printmaker, and a self-described media archaeologist, having salvaged and restored historic printing equipment from at least a dozen print shops to date. Using these resources he actively runs CODEX in New Orleans, a design studio and print shop which focuses on artful production and independent publishing for local businesses, writers, and artists alike. In another capacity he curates a one-of-a-kind archive of some 30,000 historic New Orleans newspapers dating from the late 19th to the early 20th century, Nola DNA. In 2016 he toured Europe for the 100th anniversary of Dada, visiting Dadaist collections, attending exhibitions on Dadaism, worked in print various print shops, and gave a performance at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. He has instructed courses in literature, writing and publishing for Tulane, Loyola, and Delgado.

Cecilia Martinez-Gil has published two full-length poetry collections, “a fix of ink” and “Psaltery and Serpentines,” winner of the Poetry Award, Gival Press; finalist for the ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Award for Poetry; finalist in the National Best Books 2010 Awards for Poetry; runner-up for the Los Angeles Book Festival Poetry Award. Her work has been published in Paddock Review, Levure Litteraire, Unlikely Stories, and her career as a journalist have been published in Spanish in multiple newspapers. She has co-organized three-panel presentations at three national conferences in Los Angeles (AWP 2016), Portland (AWP 2019), and Minneapolis (ALTA 2017) about literary translation, language justice, and multilingual works of literature. Cecilia will be a panelist for AWP 2022, for How to Win a Book or Chapbook Contest, alongside Gival Press writers and publishers. A graduate of USC with a B.A. in Comparative Literature, Cecilia has an M.A. in Spanish from the University of California, Los Angeles; an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Loyola Marymount University; an M.A. in Urban Sustainability and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She teaches English and Latin American Literatures at Santa Monica College, an Associate Professor. Originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, Cecilia lives in Santa Monica, California, with her husband, professional musician and composer Federico Ramos, and their daughter Magaluna, an emergent singer/songwriter.

Daphne Maysonet is a Caribbean-American writer whose poetry can be found in Southern Indiana Review and Chautauqua, and whose prose can be found at Luna Luna Magazine and The Memphis Flyer. She has presented and  read at the New Orleans Poetry Festival, New York City Poetry Festival, Writers for Migrant Justice - Memphis and Kansas City's Fountainverse. She received her MFA from the University of Memphis, where she served as lead poetry editor for The Pinch. Previous editorial roles include Sand Hills and Corner Club Press, which she co-founded. She was a finalist for the 2021 Graywolf Citizen Literary Fellowship and winner of the South Central MLA Poetry Prize. Currently, Daphne is working on a collection of poetry, leading community workshop Memphis Writers, which she co-founded and teaching college. Visit https://linktr.ee/daphnemaysonet for more.

Jessie McCarty is writer and cataloger. They are Artistic-Director of Runaways Lab Theater in Chicago and write poetics regarding archives, Irish mythologies, and Shreveport, louisiana. 

Joyelle McSweeney is a poet interested in sound and event, the toxic and the Sublime. She is the author of eight books of poetry, prose, verse plays, and poetics. Recent works include the double-poetry collection Toxicon and Arachne; the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks; and The Necopastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a work of goth ecopoetics. With Johannes Göransson, she runs the international press Action Books, which has published poets like Aase Berg, Raúl Zurita, Kim Hyesoon, Anaïs Duplan, and Don Mee Choi. She lives in the Rust Belt.

Lenna Mendoza is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi. Her poetry has appeared in Screen Door Review, plain china, Speculative City, and elsewhere. 

Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington-Bothell.  Work has appeared in Fence, Triple Canopy, Cabinet, PennSound Authors, Jacket2, Tagvverk, Gauss PDF, as well as a variety of performance and gallery venues.  He is the author of Failure, A Writer's Life (Zer0 Books: 2013) and Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (University of Minnesota Press: 2006).  <www.joemilutis.com>

Apoorva Mittal (they/she) is a queer author from northern India. They have an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Now she is working on a PhD in Creative Writing (Fiction) at University of Southern Mississippi. They are an alum of Tin House Winter Workshop 2022. Their work has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project. Their creative work can be found in Electric Literature. Before becoming a writer and teacher, they dabbled with codes and computers and created assistive aids for the visually impaired. Their research can be found in 3rd International Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology, IEEE.

Matthew Moniz is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. Originally from the DC area, he holds an MFA and MA from McNeese State University and a BA from Notre Dame. Among other national and international journals, Matt’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Crab Orchard Review, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, and minnesota review. He has been awarded the SCMLA Poetry Prize and grown in workshops with Tin House and the Community of Writers.

A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is the author of Coronary (Fitzgerald Letterpress, 2011), Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City (Arcadia/The History Press, 2014), and Ecotone (Antenna/Press Street, 2017). His work appears in such places as The Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lithub, and The Southern Review, and has received fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, Tulane University, and A Studio in the Woods. Recently he won the 2021 Words & Music Writing Competition for Poetry, judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Formerly a resident of the United Kingdom, he now lives in New Orleans. http://benjaminalanmorris.com.

Olivia Muenz holds an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where she earned the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose and served as an editor for New Delta Review. She is the author of forthcoming chapbook Where Was I Again (Essay Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill Journal, Anomaly, Denver Quarterly's F I V E S, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Louisiana State University. Find her online at oliviamuenz.com.

Laura Mullen earned her BA at the University of California-Berkeley and MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her collections of poetry include EtC (2023), Complicated Grief (2015), Enduring Freedom (2012), Dark Archive (2011), Murmur (2007), After I Was Dead (1999), and The Surface (1991), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Her poems are included in anthologies such as American Hybrid (2009), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (2012), and I'll Drown my Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012), among others. Black Square Editions published her translation of Véronique Pittolo’s HERO (2019) and an artist’s book with photographs by John David O’Brien, Verge, was published in a limited edition in 2018.

Sean F. Munro is a poet, filmmaker, Associate Professor of English, and Associate Editor for Lavender Ink / Diálogos. Sean is the executive director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, curates The Splice Poetry Series, and manages LitWire: the literary events calendar of New Orleans. Publications & performances can be found at seanFmunro.com

Kay Murphy (MFA Goddard College) is Professor Emerita at the University of New Orleans where she taught in the English Department, the Creative Writing Workshop, and the Honors Program, and served as Poetry Editor for Bayou.  She was awarded the Louisiana Division of the Arts Individual Artist Grant in 2002 for her poetry and a University-wide Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001. Since coming to UNO in the fall of 1984, she has published over fifty essay/reviews of contemporary poetry in national journals such as The American Book Review, Chelsea, and The Spoon River Poetry Review.   Besides reviews, she has published fiction in such journals as Ascent and Fiction International.  Her heart-genre, poetry, has appeared in over 100 journals such as North American Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She is the author of two poetry collections: The Autopsy and Belief Blues.  She has taught in Innsbruck, Austria, Montpellier, France, San Miguel, Mexico, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Cork, Ireland. Her most recent publication is editor of On A Wednesday Night poems from the creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans (UNO Press, 2019.

Michael Newton is a member of the editorial collective at Ugly Duckling Presse, where he is the managing editor of the journal Second Factory. He is also a bookseller at the Asbury Book Cooperative in Asbury Park, NJ, where he runs the used book section and hosts a Crime Book Club. He is also the co-publisher of the online magazine Asphalte. Recent work appears at In The Mood Magazine. 

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and the chapbook, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness,The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He has also been featured on both the "VS" podcast and "The Slowdown". He is the Wit Tea co-editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA. www.joshua-nguyen.com

Isobel O’Hare is a poet and essayist who has dual Irish and American citizenship. She is the author of the chapbooks Wild Materials (Zoo Cake Press, 2015), The Garden Inside Her (Ladybox Books, 2016), and Heartbreak Machinery (forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2018). Her collection of erasures of celebrity sexual assault apologies, all this can be yours, is now available from University of Hell Press. 

Two of O’Hare’s poems appeared in the anthology A Shadow Map (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press, 2017). A collaboration with the poet Sarah Lyn Rogers was published in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Six of O’Hare’s erasures are due to appear in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3 (Bettering Books, 2018). 

O’Hare graduated summa cum laude from Trinity College in Washington, D.C., where she was awarded the Mary Boyle McCrory Award for Excellence in Writing. She went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. O’Hare has also been the recipient of awards from Split This Rock and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. 

In addition to writing, O’Hare co-edits (with Carleen Tibbetts) the journal and small press Dream Pop.

Andrea Panzeca is a teaching artist with KID smART and has taught visual art and dance at the Contemporary Arts Center, environmental education at UNO’s Coastal Education and Research Facility, and modern dance at Lelia Haller School of Ballet. With support from The Platforms Fund, she’s developing a multidisciplinary project combining outdoor service, recreation, and reflection through art. She earned her M.F.A. in creative nonfiction writing at the University of New Orleans, where she was associate nonfiction editor of Bayou Magazine. She has published poetry, memoir, a scholarly essay on Zora Neale Hurston, and is the author of poetry chapbooks Rusted Bells and Daisy Baskets, and Weird... Joe Pesci. http://www.andreapanzeca.com

Lisa Pasold is originally from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and has published 6 books. Her 2012 book, Any Bright Horse, was nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry. She has been writing daily poems for two decades; the resulting work has appeared in magazines such as Fence, Room, and New American Writing. Lisa has taught Creative Writing at the American University in Paris and has worked as a journalist for publications such as The Chicago Tribune and Billboard Magazine; her favorite cocktail is the French75. www.lisapasold.com

Jonathan Penton founded the electronic journal Unlikely Stories in 1998, and continues to run it as editor-in-chief. He serves and has served in an editorial, management, or technical role for numerous arts organizations, including Big Bridge and MadHat, Inc. He now serves as Technical Director for the New Orleans Poetry Festival and Rigorous: a journal by people of color. He has organized literary performances, and performed himself, across the United States. His own books of poems are BACKSTORIES (Argotist Ebooks), Standards of Sadiddy (Lit Fest Press), Painting Rust and Blood and Salsa (Unlikely Books), and Last Chap (Vergin’ Press). He lives in New Orleans.

Jennifer Polson Peterson is a poet living in south Mississippi. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Image, and elsewhere. Her chapbook-length projects have been longlisted for the Hollingworth Prize with Partus Press and named a finalist for Harbor Review’s Editor’s Prize. She is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers where she teaches writing and serves as an assistant editor for Mississippi Review. Find her at jpolsonpeterson.com and instagram.com/j.polson.peterson.

Born in 1975, Virginie Poitrasson is a poet, translator and performer. Originally from Lyon, she taught at Tulane University in New Orleans and Fordham University in New York and now lives in Paris. Virginie Poitrasson’s poetry collections include among others: Tantôt, tantôt, tantôt (éditions du Seuil), Une position qui est une position qui en est une autre (éditions Lanskine), Le pas-comme-si des choses (éditions de l’Attente), Il faut toujours garder en tête une formule magique (éditions de l’Attente), Demi-valeurs (éditions de l’Attente) and Série ombragée (Propos2 éditions). Poitrasson also translates poets Cole Swensen, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Marylin Hacker, Charles Bernstein, Jennifer K. Dick, Michelle Noteboom, Shanxing Wang, Rodrigo Toscano, and Laura Elrick for a French audience and has published the following booklength translations: Angle of yaw by Ben Lerner (Joca Seria), First figure by Michael Palmer, with Éric Suchère (José Corti), and Slowly by Lyn Hejinian (Format Américain). She has also written about the work of Pierre Soulages for the New York gallery Levy Gorvy Dayan. The unlikeness of things  translated by Michelle Noteboom will be published in 2025 by Litmus Press. She regularly performs and gives public readings in France and abroad. With the composer and flautist Joce Mienniel, she created Chambre(s) à Écho(s), a musical show awarded by SACD/Beaumarchais. https://linktr.ee/virginiepoitrasson 

Jennifer Rathbun, poet and translator, is a Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at Ball State University in Indiana. She received her PhD at the University of Arizona specializing in Contemporary Latin American Literature. Rathbun is the translator of seventeen poetry books by Hispanic authors such as Alberto Blanco and Minerva Margarita Villarreal, editor of two anthologies of poetry and author of the poetry collection El libro de traiciones / The Book of Betrayals (2021).  Rathbun was awarded the 2021 Ambroggio Prize by the Academy of American Poets for her translation of Cardinal in My Window With a Mask on its Beak by Colombian author Carlos Aguasaco. She is a member of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a writer, sociology professor, translator, and attorney. Recent, and forthcoming, publications include poetry in Pacifica Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, Second Factory, HAD and Trampset; prose in Sleet and Jellyfish Review; scholarly articles in Journal of Autoethnography and Liminalities.  Book-length translations include I’ll Trade you this Island (2018) by Cindy Jiménez-Vera and Recetas Naturales para el Mundo Fenomenal (2017) by Sommer Browning. His book-length essay Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018) was published by Palgrave Macmillan in their New Caribbean Studies Series. He belongs to/with Lucas Imar and Ariadna Michelle. Happily so.

Chad Reynolds is a poet and visual artist from Oklahoma City, OK. He is the author of five poetry chapbooks, and his typewriter art has been featured in magazines and journals in the U.S., Germany, and Denmark. He is the co-founder of Penny Candy Books, an independent book publisher that highlights diverse issues and life experiences in children’s books. Reynolds was once an insurance broker and an English and composition teacher and adjunct professor. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Emerson College in Boston, MA, and a BA in English and Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA. He is also the co-founder of Short Order Poems, a performance-art poetry experience that uses typewriters to create poetry on demand for strangers.

Brad Richard is the author of Habitations (Portals Press, 2000); Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011 - winner of the 2010 Washington Prize); Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012); and Parasite Kingdom (The Word Works, 2019 - winner of the 2018 Tenth Gate Prize). He has also published four chapbooks, including Larval Songs (Antenna, 2018), a collaboration with artist Kelly Anne Mueller, and, most recently, In Place, chosen for the Robin Becker Series from Seven Kitchens Press. He serves on the editorial board of The Word Works (as imprint editor for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection) and is on the faculty of the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops for teachers. He lives, writes, edits, and occasionally teaches in New Orleans. More at bradrichard.org.

Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1949, graduated from Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, and earned a BA in philosophy and English literature at Yale University. He is the author of two dozen collections of poetry, including Quarantina (Lavender Ink, 2022), Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015) and The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009). Recent poems appear in Brooklyn Rail, Blazing Stadium, Cold Mountain Review, Exquisite Pandemic, Three Fold, and Traffic Report.
A collaborator on The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975–1980 (Mode A, 2010), Robinson has taught with California Poets in the Schools, performed with San Francisco Poets Theater and, with poet Lyn Hejinian, produced In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets, a weekly Bay Area radio show of interviews and readings. Kit has received fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, as well as an award from the Fund for Poetry. His papers and media are collected at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Robinson’s  essays on poetics, art, travel and music may be found online at Open Space, Jacket2, and Nowhere. He lives in Berkeley and plays Cuban tres guitar in the charanga band Calle Ocho. Keep up with him at his website, https://kitrobinson.net/

Thomas Rothe holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from the Universidad de Chile and currently lectures at the Universidad Católica de Chile. He has published translations of the following volumes of poetry: Jaime Huenún’s Fanon City Meu (Diálogos Books, 2018), Rodrigo Lira’s Testimony of Circumstances (co-translated with Rodrigo Olavarría, Cardboard House Press, 2018), Julieta Marchant’s The Birth of Thread (TinFish Press, 2019), and Emma Villazón’s Expendables (OOMPH! Press, 2019). With Lucía Stecher, he has translated into Spanish Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously (Banda Propia, 2019) and Claire of the Sea Light (Banda Propia, 2021). He is coordinating a collaborative translation of Carlos Soto Román’s 11, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Emmalea Russo is the author of G (2018) and Wave Archive (2019). Recent poems and essays have appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her next book, Confetti, is forthcoming in 2022 from Hyperidean Press. Her website is emmalearusso.com.

New Orleans editor, writer, filmmaker and teacher Kalamu ya Salaam is founder of the Neo-Griot Workshop (1995 - 2005), a Black writers workshop focusing on text, recordings and videos; co-founder with Kysha Brown-Robinson of Runagate Multimedia publishing company; and moderator of e-Drum, a listserv for Black writers and diverse supporters of their literature. His latest books are The Magic of Juju: A History of the Black Arts Movement (Third World Press - 2016) and he is editor of New Orleans Griot - The Tom Dent Reader (University of New Orleans Press - 2017). Salaam can be reached at kalamu@mac.com 

Rone Shavers is author of the experimental Afrofuturist novel Silverfish (Clash Books), a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction and one of The Brooklyn Rail’s “Best Books of 2020.” His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Big Other, BOMB, Black Warrior Review, and PANK. Shavers’ non-fiction essays and essay-length reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as American Book Review, Electronic Book Review, Fiction Writers Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is Associate Professor of English at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and fiction editor at Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora.

Robin Sinclair

Tyler Smith comes by way of Maiden Rock, WI, an unincorporated lake town on the edge of a Mississippi oxbow. He is a writer and critic of/with disability pursuing his PhD at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Redactions, Image, Colorado Review, South Dakota Review, Ruminate, amongst others. 

Té V. Smith is the author of the chapbook, PERMISSION TO SPEAK (Spokenvisions 1990), the collection, HERE WE ARE, and his first Middle Grade novel is set for release October 2022 through Hiddentimber Books. Té’s short fiction appears or is forthcoming in several publications such as Tin House, Blavity, Black Girl in Ohm, and The Kenyan Review. Té lives, teaches History and Creative Writing in New Orleans. 

Meghan Sullivan is a poet, teacher, Long Islander, and lover. Currently living and working in New Orleans, she is the runner up for the 2022 Andrea-Saunders Gereighty Award and an Associate Editor for Bayou Magazine. She is pursuing her MFA in Poetry in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. You can find her at @sunnysullypoetry on instagram. 

Rebecca Teich is a writer, editor, and teacher based in New York. A co-curator of the Fall 2018 and 2019 Segue Reading Series, Artists Space teaching-poet-in-residence 2019-2021, and co-founder of The Anchoress Syndicate, a queer poetry and performance collective, Teich's work has been featured in No, Dear Magazine, poets.org, Nightboat Resonances, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Baest Journal, and elsewhere. Teich’s first chapbook, Caffeine Chronicles (2021), was published by Portable Press @ YoYo Labs.

Em Tielman is a creative writer from Buffalo, NY. She is a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Her current works-in-progress, New Material and From a Lack, explore ecocritical, postcolonial, and affect theory, as well as linguistics. In her spare time, she enjoys dancing at raves and taking photos of insects.

Rodrigo Toscano is a poet and essayist based in New Orleans. He is the author of eleven books of poetry. His latest two books are The Cut Point (Counterpath, 2023), The Charm & The Dread (Fence Books, 2022). His previous books include In Range, Explosion Rocks Springfield, Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater (a National Poetry Series selection), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, andThe Disparities. His poetry has appeared in over 20 anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Best American Experimental Poetry (BAX).  Toscano has received a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. He won the Edwin Markham 2019 prize for poetry. He works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers, the National Institute for Environmental Health Science, National Day Laborers Organizing Network educational / training projects that involve environmental and labor justice culture transformation. rodrigotoscano.com

Poet Quincy Troupe's most recent book of poetry Duende: Poems, 1966 – Now was published in January 2022 by Seven Stories Press. Quincy Troupe is a biographer, journalist, professor, spoken word performer with noted musicians, an alumnus of the Watts Writers Workshop, associated with the Black Arts Movement, and a former California Poet Laureate. Troupe may be the only American poet to have co-written two bestselling autobiographies, one of which, Miles: The Autobiography, is considered a milestone of contemporary jazz biography. He co-wrote The Pursuit of Happyness, which spent over 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. 

Nikki Ummel is a queer artist and an editor for Bear Review. Nikki has been published or has work forthcoming with Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Black Lawrence Press, and others. She is the 2022 recipient of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize and 2023 recipient of the Juxtaprose Poetry Award for her manuscript, Bloom. Nikki is the co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOLA DNA, 2023), funded by the New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Foundation. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com

Danielle "Danny" Unger is a poet and social worker living in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Dana Venerable (she, her(s)) is a writer, educator, former co-editor of P-QUEUE journal (2019-2022), and a SUNY-University at Buffalo (UB) English PhD candidate with a concentration in Performance Studies. She lived between Buffalo, NY and the Jersey Shore (her birthplace) for the past few years and currently works in the President's Office co-managing the Equity in Action Postdoctoral Fellowship at Kean University in Union, NJ. Her research addresses methods of the archive through compositions and intersections of Black performance, dance, notation, social choreography, and sound. Dana has performed within artist collectives at UB Arts Collaboratory, PLAY/GROUND, UB’s Choreolab, and UB's MFA Dance Concert. In addition, she was a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center from 2019-2022. She won the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize at UB. Dana has written for Rigorous, Snail Trail Press, Peach Mag, Free Your Soul & Mind Inc., P-QUEUE, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. Her collaborative, choreographed chapbook water signatures is out by What Happens Magazine through their semi-annual publication series "in the grasses:" https://whathappens.world/leaflet-series. She can be found dancing and singing around almost anywhere but especially her room, writing (!), listening to music, and doing her hair.

Jeff Weddle is a poet, short story writer and small press historian living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Among his thirteen books are the Welty Prize winning Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2007), When Giraffes Flew: Short Stories (Southern Yellow Pine, 2015), and poetry collections Comes to This (Nixes Mate, 2017) Heart of the Broken World (Nixes Mate, 2017) Citizen Relent (Unlikely Books, 2019), A Puncher’s Chance (Rust Belt Press, 2019) and others. His most recent volume is Advice for Cannibals (Poetic Justice Books, 2022). A former radio disc jockey, fry cook, Tae Kwon Do teacher, newspaper reporter, and public library director, Jeff teaches in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. He spends entirely too much time on Facebook and this link will get you to him there: https://www.facebook.com/jeff.weddle1.  His website can be found at jeffweddle.com.

Enrique Winter (Chile, 1982) is one of Latin America's most prominent poets of his generation. His books Skyscrapers, Suns and Sign Tongue –which was awarded both the Pablo de Rokha and the Goodmorning Menagerie prizes– are available in English. His most recent collection is Variaciones de un día, co-written with José Kozer. He is also a novelist and a translator of Dickinson, Chesterton, Larkin, Howe and Bernstein. Winter leads the Creative Writing diploma at PUCV.

Holly Woodward is a writer and artist. She’s working on a novel about Russian women snipers and spies in World War II. 

She combines her poetry, calligraphy, and painting into handmade books.

She served as writer in residence at St. Albans, Washington National Cathedral, and was a fellow for four years at CUNY Graduate Center’s Writers’ Institute.

Ariel Yelen’s poetry has appeared in the POETRY, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Conjunctions, Washington Square Review, and other journals. She lives in Brooklyn and serves as the associate editor for Futurepoem, where she also edits the blog futurefeed. 

Andy Young's second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in October. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently been published, or is forthcoming, in The Greensboro Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and Missouri Review. Her poems have also been featured in contemporary and flamenco dance productions. andyyoung.org

R.  Zack Zachary is an independent Chaplain, an inspirational Poet, Storyteller, Singer, Visionary, and Activist. His presentations combine life, music, poetry, history and storytelling with positive and holistic perspectives of how we will win our fight for freedom, justice, and peace.

Zack majored in Voice upon entering college.  Later was accepted in The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus under Maestro Robert Shaw.  After volunteering for the military to keep from going to Vietnam; his musical talents were noticed and he became a member of the 7th Army Chorus in Heidelberg, Germany  and traveled over Europe.

Zachary became an activist at age eleven and four years later met Dr. Martin L. King at a Mass Meeting in his hometown, Anniston, Alabama.   From that renowned meeting, he has continued throughout the years to follow a path of  Activism, Peace and Love for All.  He was squarely involved in the Civil Rights Struggle in high school; attending Mass Meetings every Sunday night and participating in school boycotts and marches in Alabama. 

Zachary continued this activism in  college and when he  went into the military.  He, with three other GI’s started a group to bring more awareness to the causes of race and unfairness in the military.  His first poem, Old Beautiful Flower’ was written during this time.  He lead one of the few demonstrations ever in the military on the US Army Headquarters in Heidelberg,Germany.

Zachary founded both the Healing Love Institute and Dialogue Cafe, along with ‘Ankhe’ Linell Todd; after they relocated to Asheville in 2005.  The Healing Love Institute and Dialogue Cafe (Getting America Talking Again) came out of his years of activism and working to enhance life in a holistic manner. The Dialogue sessions began in Asheville and Atlanta and have been given in thirteen different cities. He is the author of two books of poems:  “21 Love Poems of Sad Joyousness” and ‘Behold America, BeWHole’.
 Zack presently resides in Asheville, NC in a community promoting sustainable and holistic living.