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 has 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. Smith teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, and lives in Minneapolis with their people.

Catherine Strisik, poet, teacher, editor is author of The Mistress (3: A Taos Press, 2016, awarded New Mexico/AZ Book Award for Poetry 2017); Thousand-Cricket Song (Plain View Press, 2010, second edition 2016); and chapbook: Insectum Gravitis (Main Street Rag, 2019, finalist New Mexico/AZ Book Award 2020), and Goat, Goddess, Moon forthcoming from Holy Cow! Press, 2025. She is co-founder and editor of Taos Journal of Poetry, former poet laureate of Taos, New Mexico, as well as the recipient of a Taoseña Award as Woman of Impact for literary contribution in northern N.M. Strisik is a Pushcart nominee with over 30 years of publications with poetry translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. Currently, she divides her time between Cape Ann, MA and Taos, N.M. from where she offers both live and online editorial consultations for essayists and poets and facilitates both private and small group poetry workshops. Strisik is a retired language therapist for children diagnosed with dyslexia.

Ashanti Files is the 2021 Urbana Poet Laureate Emeritus, a 2022 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, Winner of the 2024 All Maricopa Slam, and a member of the Regional Championship Poetry team hosted by Ghost Poetry Show. She was most recently published in a collection by the Harvard School of Medical Humanities Journal, In Vivo, and Tadpole Press (forthcoming), as well as featured at the 2023 Southern Arizona Arts & Cultural Alliance exhibit "Uncommon Knowledge."  Her interests include the intersections of poetry and resilience, with a focus on writing to improve Mental Health. Ashanti is a Registered Nurse, enrolled in a graduate program to achieve a Master's degree as a Psychiatric/Mental Health Nurse Practitioner.  You can find out more about her poetry and workshops at libraries and schools at www.writersofoya.com. You can view past performances and readings on YouTube by searching " Ashanti Files Poet".

Sara Sams is the author of Atom City, a book of poetry that scrutinizes various legacies of her Manhattan Project hometown: the received history of the atomic bomb, local mythologies orbiting that narrative, and closer stories of family and inheritance. Reviewing the collection, poet Sarah Vap writes: “Sams shows us what violence and invisible interiority and tenderness is at the core of the American hometown. At the core of the American superpower myth. At the core of American exceptionalism, and uranium, and the atom, itself— which is at the core of everything.” Sams grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and researches the influence discoveries in particle physics have had on contemporary poetics. Creatively, she is working on new poems about medical science, childbirth, infant surgery, and metaphysics, as well as a novel about nuclear-reactor-powered ghosts and the opioid crisis in rural Tennessee.