L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, where she served as Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. Her work, nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, has been anthologized and published in a variety of publications. As mentioned, she was a recent resident of The Peter Bullough Foundation for the Arts. She believes in Black joy, which she occasionally expresses on Instagram.

Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing and serves as Director of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem, How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem, and Letters from the Other Woman, and the co-author of the suffrage play, Pageant of Agitating Women, with Anna Andes. Her work appears in Wildness, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee obsessed with maxi skirts with pockets and yoga, Prince writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation.

Khalisa Rae is an award-winning poet, educator, and journalist in Durham, NC. She is the author of Real Girls Have Real Problems and the debut poetry collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat (Red Hen Press 2021), and former Senior Writer for Jezebel Magazine. Her essays are featured in Autostraddle, Catapult, LitHub, as well as articles in Jezebel, Blavity, Bitch Media, NBC-BLK, and others. Her poetry appears in Southern Humanities Review, Frontier Poetry, Florida Review, Rust & Moth, PANK, HOBART, among countless others. She is the winner of the Appy Award, Vulgar Genius, Bright Wings Poetry contest, the Furious Flower Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, among other prizes. Khalisa’s work has led her to speak in front of thousands, and her powerful poetry has graced stages at the National Poetry Slam, Women of the World Poetry Slam, and Southern Fried Poetry Slam. As an accomplished writer in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, Khalisa has been a fellow at the Watering Hole, Winter Tangerine, and the Frost Place. Currently, she is the Publications Coordinator for Split This Rock and is the Founding EIC of Think in Ink BIPOC collective. Her YA novel in verse, Unlearning Eden, is forthcoming.In her spare time, Khalisa works to uplift the community and provide resources for emerging writers of color.

Sean Murphy is founder of the non-profit 1455 Literary Arts. He has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and been publishing reviews and essays for the last two decades. His third collection of poems, Kinds of Blue, and his first collection of short stories, This Kind of Man, are forthcoming in 2024. He has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, twice for Best of Net, and his book Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone was the winner of Memoir Magazine’s 2022 Memoir Prize. 

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