Benjamin Alfaro is a writer and educator from Michigan. He is a 2017 Kresge Artist Fellow and the co-author of Home Court (Red Beard, 2014). His work was anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Duende, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He has also appeared on the HBO Original Series Brave New Voices, Yahoo!’s Cities Rising: Rebuilding America, and Michigan Public Radio. His chapbook, Fantasma, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Dana Alsamsam is a queer, Syrian-American poet from Chicago and an MFA candidate at Emerson College. She is assistant poetry editor at Redivider and editorial assistant at Ploughshares. Dana’s chapbook (in)habit is forthcoming from tenderness, yea press and her poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry East, Hobart, DIALOGIST, The Collapsar, Bad Pony Mag, Tinderbox Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, BOOTH and others. @DanaAlsamsam.

Adrian Blevins is the author of the full-length poetry collections Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the Wilder Prize, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha; the chapbooks Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes; and the co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She is the recipient of many awards including a Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among others. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Peg Daniels’s creative nonfiction and fiction has appeared in Kaleidoscope Magazine, New Mobility, Rosebud, The Dos Passos Review, Little (Flash) Fiction, moonShine review, and Southern Women’s Review. One short story reached the finals of Black Warrior Review’s 2015 Fiction Contest. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, and she lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband and two cats.

Camille T. Dungy is an award-winning poet and editor and professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. She lives with her husband and child in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Robert Maynor is from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. He has worked as a commercial plumber, dishwasher, meter-reader, sprinkler-man, etc. His work has previously appeared in The Carolina Quarterly Online, Bartleby Snopes, and bioStories.

Jory Mickelson is a queer writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Vinyl Poetry, The Florida Review, Superstition Review, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, and other journals in the United States and the UK. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry. His most recent chapbook Slow Depth was published by Argus House Press.

Corey Oglesby is a poet, musician, and illustrator from the Washington, D.C., area. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, DIAGRAM, Beloit Poetry Journal, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. Learn more at www.coreyoglesby.com

Laura Read’s chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was published in 2012 by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her second collection, Dresses from the Old Country, will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2018. She teaches English at Spokane Falls Community College and currently serves as the poet laureate of Spokane.

Kathryn Smith is the author of the poetry collection Book of Exodus (Scablands Books, 2017). Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, Redivider, The Collagist, The Boiler, and elsewhere. Her work has received a grant from the Spokane Arts Fund, and she was writer-in-residence at Whitworth University for fall 2017.

Laurie Stone is author most recently of My Life as an Animal: Stories. She was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle and has published numerous stories in such publications as Tin House, Evergreen Review, Fence, Open City, Anderbo, The Collagist, New Letters, TriQuarterly, Threepenny Review, and Creative Nonfiction. In 2005, she participated in “Novel: An Installation,” writing a book and living in a house designed by architects Salazar/Davis in the Flux Factory’s gallery space. She has frequently collaborated with composer Gordon Beeferman in text/music works. The world premier of their piece “You, the Weather, a Wolf” was presented in the 2016 season of the St. Urbans concerts. She is at work on The Love of Strangers, a collage of hybrid narratives.

Lucille Sutton was born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Louisiana, Mississippi, and California. She earned her BA in English and her MFA in fiction from Fresno State. Her work has appeared in SN Review, In the Grove, Prick of the Spindle, JMWW, and Bamboo Ridge Press. She was acknowledged in the Indiana Review: Writers of Color edition and as a top-ten finalist for the Dana Awards Short Fiction Contest. Her novel excerpts were finalists for the SLS/ St. Petersburg Writing Contest and SLS/ Kenya Writing Contest. Current nonfiction projects include experiences in the roller skating culture, both as a rink rat and flat track roller derby skater. She teaches writing at Fresno State and lives in Clovis, California with her husband, two dogs, and one very fancy cat.

Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the author of the collection of poems Fast Fat Girls in Pink Hot Pants (2012) about her experiences in the urban North and rural South. Recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as the Harvard Review, Poet Lore, Ecotone, The Account, Pleiades, and Solstice.  New essays, “Sonny Boy” and “A Lynching in North Carolina,” appear in The Hopkins Review and Tupelo Quarterly. Her most recent literary/cultural criticism, “Appalachian Literature and Race Relations in the Newer South: Homogeneity and History in Ron Rash’s Burning Bright and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard,” appears in Seeking Home: Marginalization and Representation in Appalachian Literature and Song (University of Tennessee Press, 2017). She has received The Mona Van Duyn Scholarship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Mary Hambidge Distinguished Fellowship from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts for her nonfiction. She is visiting assistant professor of American cultural studies at Albright College in Pennsylvania.

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