Stephanie Niu is a Chinese-American poet from Marietta, Georgia, and the author of She Has Dreamt Again of Water (Diode Editions, 2022), winner of the 2021 Diode Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Southeast Review, Poets Reading the News, and Storm Cellar, as well as in scientific collaborations including the eleventh annual St. Louis River Summit.

Rahul Mehta is the author of the novel No Other World (Harper, 2017) and the short-story collection Quarantine (HarperPerennial, 2011). Their work has been awarded a Lambda Literary Award and an Asian American Literary Award and has appeared in numerous publications, including Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, NOON, The Sun, and the New York Times. Born and raised in West Virginia in a Gujarati-American household, they teach creative writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Their collection of poems and lyric essays is forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky.

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, The Florida Review, and in the anthology My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora. He is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021). In 2018, Atefat-Peckham was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet. He lives in Huntington, West Virginia, and currently studies English and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Harvard College.

D. S. Waldman is a Marsh-Rebelo scholar at San Diego State University. His work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, and Missouri Review. Waldman directs the San Diego–based organization Poetic Youth, which brings MFA creative writing students into under-resourced high school classrooms to facilitate creative writing workshops.

Leah Brand was born in Boca Raton, Florida, and raised in the Jewish community there. Having recently completed her MA in art history, she now lives and works as a poet and art historian in Washington, D.C. This is her first major poetry publication.

Lis Sanchez is a North Carolina Arts Council Writer’s Fellow and has poetry published or forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Puritan, Poetry Northwest, Cincinnati Review, The Bark, Copper Nickel, and other magazines. She is a recipient of Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing, Nimrod’s Editors’ Choice Award, and The Greensboro Review Award for Fiction.

Melanie Tafejian teaches and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University, where she won the North Carolina State Poetry Prize. Tafejian serves as a reader for The Raleigh Review and her poems appear in The Atlanta Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals.

Dusty Mike Perez earned their MFA degree in poetry at the University of Houston as well as an MA in creative writing from Florida State University. Formerly a professional ballet/jazz dancer, they are currently an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. Their poems have appeared in Oscilloscope Lit, BLOOM, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Bluing the Blade, Top Shelf Review, Crab Orchard Review, the Bangalore Review, The Florida Review, Beyond Queer Words, and Sand Hills.