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.

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.