Luisa A. Igloria is the author of sixteen books, including Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (co-winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize) and The Buddha Wonders if She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, 2018), and four chapbooks. Originally from Baguio City, she makes her home in Norfolk, Virginia, where she teaches in Old Dominion University’s MFA creative writing program and at the Muse Writers Center. In July 2020, she was appointed twentieth poet laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Academy of American Poets awarded her a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellowship in April 2021.

Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. A recipient of fellowships from the Surge Institute, CantoMundo, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, he has served on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle, the International David Foster Wallace Society, and Families Together Cooperative Nursery School. His poems and book reviews have appeared online and in print. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.

Joanmarie Bañez is a doctoral student in literature at the University of California, San Diego, from Atlanta, Georgia, where she completed her BA and MA in English literary studies at Georgia State University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century multiethnic literature of the United States, Asian American diaspora in the U.S. South, transracial adoption narratives, and fictive kinship. She is the Decolonizing Initiatives Chair for the Society of the Study of Southern Literature’s Emerging Scholars Organization, and her work can be found in the South Atlantic Review.

Hasanthika Sirisena’s debut essay collection Dark Tourist won the 2020 Gournay Prize and was released by Mad Creek Books, Ohio State University Press, in December 2021.

Samuel Okoli, a Nigerian-American writer, graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a dual degree in creative writing and psychology. He spends much of his free time writing poems, short stories, and a developing book manuscript, all while working as an application developer. He currently resides in Aurora, Illinois.