Sarah Aziza (she/هي ) is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of the genre-bending memoir The Hollow Half, winner of the Palestine Book Award and named a Most Anticipated and Best Book of the Year by Vulture, Vanity Fair, Literary Hub, Elle, Electric Literature, Mizna, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. 

Sarah’s award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other publications. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, Arabic, Swedish, Italian, and German. The recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, USA Artists, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Sarah has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, Palestine, and the United States. 

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is the author of peluda, Dreaming of You, Candelaria, and Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! She teaches creative writing at the Center for Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library, and Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Brian Broome’s debut memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, is an NYT Editor’s Pick and the winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. He is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. His work has also appeared in Hippocampus, Poets and Writers, Medium, and more. Brian was a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Rob Franklin is the author of Great Black Hope, which was published in June 2025. A national bestseller, his debut novel has been nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. His other recent work can be found in New York Magazine, Cultured, and Interview, among others. A co-founder of Art for Black Lives, Franklin holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program. He teaches writing at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and edits fiction for Joyland.

Emily Nemens is the author of the novels The Cactus League (2020) and Clutch, which was published in February. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, Story, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere, and she has essays forthcoming in McSweeney's and The Common. Emily spent a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading The Paris Review and serving as co-editor of The Southern Review. She received her BA from Brown, an MFA from LSU, and now teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Rickey Laurentiis was born & raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to be reacquainted with the light. Boy with Thorn, their debut book, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her other honors include fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh where she was its Inaugural Fellow.

    Their poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry, BOMB & other journals. In 2022, Laurentiis was named a Living Legends Honoree by the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, an organization which celebrates black trans lives. Her second book, Death of the First Idea, published in 2025 by Knopf, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.

Elizabeth Miki Brina is the author of SPEAK, OKINAWA, a memoir published by Knopf in February of 2021 and one of NPR's "Books We Love" that year. Her work has also appeared in The Sun, River Teeth, and Literary Hub, among others. She lives and teaches in New Orleans.

Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu. She is the author of the short story collection EXTINCTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD (Ecco, 2025) and the hybrid chapbook ALL HAT, NO CATTLE (Bull City Press, 2023). Mariah is the recipient of fellowships and awards from places like the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Lambda Literary. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. His first book, Muscadine, (Four Way Books, 2023) received the 2024 Mississippi Institute of the Arts and Letters poetry award. Jerriod has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and an emerging-artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation of Boston. A former John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Avant is currently a University of Mississippi visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing there and writer-in-residence at Jackson State University.