volume 1
Ashia (they/she) is a non-binary femme from Denver, Colorado. Their work confronts the layered relationship between the Black diaspora and Western environmentalism. They have been published in The Hopper, Sage Magazine, Foglifter Press and Them, among others. They are the author of one chapbook, We Bleed Like Mango.
Kemi Alabi was born on a Sunday in July. They're author of AGAINST HEAVEN (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award, co-editor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021) and cultural strategy director of Forward Together. They live in Chicago and know abolition is the only justice.
Moncho Alvarado is a Latinx-queer-poet, translator, visual artist, and educator. They’ve been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Merdian, Foglifter, Poets.org, and other publications. They are a recipient of fellowships and residencies from The Helen Wurlitzer Foundation, Lambda Literary, Poets House, Troika House, and won the Academy of American Poet’s John B. Santoianni award for excellence in poetry.
Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. Wo’s poems appear in POETRY, Mass Review, No Tokens, and The Margins. As a standing member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in New York.
Kyle Dacuyan writes poems and makes performance. His writing has appeared in Ambit, The Offing, Social Text, and elsewhere. He is the Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's.
Chekwube Danladi is the author of Semiotics (UGA Press, September 2020), selected by Evie Shockley as the winner of the 2019 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. From Lagos by way of West Baltimore, she currently lives in Chicago.
Anaïs Duplan is the author of BLACKSPACE: ON THE POETICS OF AN AFROFUTURE (Black Ocean, 2020) and a full-length collection of poems, TAKE THIS STALLION (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016). He is the founder of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color in Iowa City.
Catherine Feliz is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curanderx, born and raised in Lenape territory (NYC) to parents from Kiskeya Ayiti (Dominican Republic). Catherine is also the co-founder of Abuela Taught Me, an Afro-Taino 2spirit space, and a founding member of Homecoming, a QTBIPOC radical care collective. As a child, they began filling up notebooks of poetry to make sense of the languages living within them.
ray ferreira is a performer of sorts. She is a blaqlatina from occupied Lenape lands called New York, NY: the illegitimate EEUU. Another spacetimemattering/materialdiscusive (dis)continuity: the Caribbean, the Greater Antilles, Hispañola, the Dominican Republic --> Corona, Queens. She stays playin. The dance between materiality<>language is a body, her body -where histories are made and remade. She uses iridescence, text, rhythms (aka systems), to cruise a quantum poetics. In this banjcriticality, Englishes, Spanishes, and other body languages spiral, dance, and twirl to to create a momentary turnup w/the grls; that swerve past white cishet patriarchy.
Aricka Foreman is a poet, essayist and artist from Detroit. Author of Salt Body Shimmer, she loves oceans, lakes and rivers & despises the word "moist". She lives, loves and agitates in Chicago.
t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Poetry and others. A 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship inaugural fellow, she is the author of two poetry collections, how to get over from Red Hen Press and & more black from Augury Books, winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.
Jan-Henry Gray is the author of Documents (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the chapbook Selected Emails (speCt!, 2019). Born in the Philippines and raised in California, Jan lived undocumented in the U.S. for more than 32 years. Most of that time was spent in busy kitchens and dark movie theatres. Among other things, Jan is a Kundiman and Undocupoets fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Adelphi University.
Omotara James is the author of the chapbook, “Daughter Tongue,” selected for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. She has received fellowships from Lambda Literary and Cave Canem Foundation. She is a recipient of the 2019 92Y/ Discovery Poetry Prize.
Inam Kang is a Pakistani-born poet and curator. His work can be found in The Shallow Ends, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, AAWW'S The Margins, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me and other journals and anthologies. He is the winner of the 2017 Winter Tangerine Awards and the 2019 Gordon Square Review Poetry Contest. He is the current Administrative Director of Winter Tangerine Workshops and a Tin House Summer Workshop alumnus.
Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and the full-length collections The Renunciations (forthcoming) and Bestiary, the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World.
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and is an MFA candidate in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere.
Kyle Carrero Lopez
Kyle Carrero Lopez is a Black-Cuban American poet. He lives in Brooklyn and reads poetry submissions for Homology Lit. His poetry is published or forthcoming in The Journal, POETRY, The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, & other journals, as well as in the anthologies The Breakbeat Poets Volume IV: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Books, 2020) and Grabbed (Beacon Press, 2020).
Jimena Lucero
Jimena Lucero is a poet & a sister. She was a 2019-2020 Emerge-Surface-Be fellow at the Poetry Project.
Xandria Phillips is a writer, educator, and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xandria has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Their first book, HULL was published by Nightboat Books in 2019 and is the winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry, as well as a finalist for the believer award.
Jasmine Reid is a twice trans poet of flowers. She is the author of Deus Ex Nigrum, winner of the 2018 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest, selected by Danez Smith. An MFA candidate at Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Poets House and Jack Jones Literary Arts, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, Apogee, the Shade Journal, Pinwheel, & Washington Square Review, among others. Jasmine was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, and is currently based in Ithaca, NY.
Pamela Sneed
Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Funeral Diva, out with City Lights in Fall 2020, as well as Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Artforum, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine.
Jennif(f)er Tamayo
Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, formerly undocumented poet, essayist, and performer. Her poetry collections include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011); Poems are the Only Real Bodies (Bloof Books 2013); DORA/ANA/GUATAVIT@ (RSH 2016), YOU DA ONE (2017 reprint Noemi Books & Letras Latinas's Akrilica Series) and her latest publication, TO KILL THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT (Green Lantern Press, 2018). Currently, JT lives and works on Ohlone and Patwin lands.
Malcolm Tariq
Malcolm Tariq is a poet and playwright from Savannah, Georgia. He is the author of Heed the Hollow, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2020 Georgia of the Year Award in Poetry. His work has been supported by Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, Horizon Theatre Company, and Liberation Theatre Company. Malcolm lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the Programs and Communications Manager at Cave Canem, a home for Black poetry.
Xime Izquierdo Ugaz is a multimedia artist/writer, curator, and educator born in Perú. They are the visual arts co-curator at Nat. Brut and their first chapbook is titled Estoy Tristeza (No, Dear Magazine & Small Anchor Press, 2018). They live with their cat, Ocean who wakes them up every morning to hear the owls talking in Lima, Peru.
Aldrin Valdez
Aldrin Valdez is a bakla writer & visual artist. They are the author of ESL or You Weren't Here (Nightboat Books), selected as a 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of the 2019 Whiting Award winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and winner of the Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Her work has been recognized with a 2019 Poetry Foundation Friends of Literature Prize, and has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, Boston Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral candidate in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.
Candace Williams
Candace Williams is a black queer nerd living a double life. By day, they’re a sixth grade humanities educator and robotics coach. By night and subway ride, they’re a poet. Their chapbook, Spells for Black Wizards, was a 2017 TAR Chapbook Series winner and published by the Atlas Review. futureblack, their first full-length poetry manuscript, was a 2018 National Poetry Series finalist.
Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World Random House, forthcoming 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured in NPR's All Things Considered, Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and he is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry and giving creative advice at The Reading.