Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute. He is also a curator for The Racial Imaginary Institute founded by poet and MacArthur Fellow, Claudia Rankine in 2016. His interviews, essays, and poetry have appeared in publications for Bomb Magazine, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Spelman Museum of Art, The International Review of African American Art as well as The Aperture Foundation, among others. He has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and Callaloo Journal.

David Larsen is a US poet and scholar of Islamic literature. His translations from Arabic have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Cambridge Literary Review, and the Poetry Project Newsletter, and the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Award went to his translation of Ibn Khalawayh’s Names of the Lion (Wave Books). David Larsen lives in New York City, blogs at https://paintedlantern.blogspot.com, and teaches at NYU.

Born in Chicago, Karen Finley received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Working in a variety of mediums such as installation, video, performance, public art, visual art, entertainment, television and film, memorials, music, and literature, she has presented her work worldwide in various venues such as The Bobino in Paris, The ICA in London and Lincoln Center in NYC. Finley lectures and gives workshop at universities and museums internationally. Her work is in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary art and the Pompidou. She is the author of eight books, including a 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment (City Lights 1990 and 2015), Reality Shows, (Feminist Press 2011), and George and Martha (Verso 2008).  Her most recent book, Grabbing Pussy, was published by OR Books in 2018. Her recent work includes, Artist Anonymous – a social practice self help open meeting for those addicted to art presented at Museum of Art and Design (2014), and Written in Sand, a performance of music and her writings on AIDS, Open Heart, a Holocaust memorial at Camp Gusen, Austria; Broken Negative, where Finley reconsiders her infamous chocolate performance that brought her to the Supreme Court, in Finley vs. NEA; and at the New Museum, NYC Sext ME if You Can, where Finley creates commissioned portraits inspired by “sexts” received from the public. Finley creates interactive walks such as Mandala: Reimaging Columbus Circle Columbia Graduate school of Architecture and Elastic City. A recipient of many awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYSCA and NEA fellowships. In 2015 she was awarded the Richard J Massey Foundation Arts and Humanities award.

Dr. Joshua Bennett is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series winner and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—as well as Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

Bennett has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Callaloo, Poetry and elsewhere. He has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. Bennett’s first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Murray Silverstein is the editor of America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (2010), Sixteen Rivers Press, and the author of two books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007), Sixteen Rivers. Any Old Wolf received 2007 Independent Publisher medal for poetry. Silverstein is a retired architect and co-author of four books about architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press). His poems have appeared in RATTLE, Brooklyn Review, Spillway, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, Zyzzyva, Fourteen Hills, Pembroke Magazine, Elysian Fields and other journals.

Nkosi Nkululeko, writer, chess instructor, and musician, is a Poets House, Callaloo, Watering Hole fellow. His poetry can be found in Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Offing, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Nkosi is a recipient of the 2019 Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts residency, and the winner of the 2018 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets. His poem “Skin Deep,” formerly published by The Adroit Journal, was selected for The Best American Poetry 2018 anthology (Scribner, 2018). Nkosi Nkululeko lives in Harlem, New York.

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Jess’ fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four books of poetry: Trophic Cascade; Smith Blue, winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize; Suck on the Marrow, winner of the American Book Award, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. Her debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers. She is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; From the Fishouse: An anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great; and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. She is a professor of English at Colorado State University.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). Along with María Isabel Álvarez, he co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). A poetry editor for DIALOGIST, he holds a PhD in English from Binghamton University and lives in Endwell, New York.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, memoirist, and lawyer. His writing grapples with the central role of incarceration to the American experience. His next collection of poetry, Felon, will be published in 2019 by Norton. His previous collection, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015) received the 2016 PEN New England Award in Poetry. His first collection of poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Breatice Hawley Award. Betts’ memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. He is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 Emerson Fellow at New America. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland; an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Hayan Charara’s poetry books are Something Sinister (2016), The Sadness of Others (2006), and The Alchemist’s Diary (2001). He also edited Inclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry, and wrote an award-winning children’s book, The Three Lucys (2016). Along with Fady Joudah, he is founder and series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He lives and teaches in Houston, Texas.