Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her collections are Crowned and the more recent Hemisphere. A proud Kentucky writer, Ellen is an Affrilachian Poets, Conjure Woman & cofounder of girlstory.

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is the recipient of the 2015 Barnes and Noble Writer for Writers Award. Arrival, her fourth collection of poetry, will be published by Northwestern University Press in June 2017. Cheryl holds an MFA in poetry from Stonecoast, and is the founder of Calypso Muse and The Glitter Pomegranate Reading Series.

Parneshia Jones is the author of Vessel: Poems, winner of the Midwest Book Award. Jones is a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award and the Aquarius Press Legacy Award. She currently holds positions as sales and community outreach manager and poetry editor for Northwestern University Press.

Patricia Smith's books are Incendiary Art, Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2013 Lenore Marshall), and Blood Dazzler (2008 National Book Award finalist). A 2014 Guggenheim fellow and two-time Pushcart winner, she is a professor at CUNY and in Sierra Nevada's MFA program.

Cynthia Dewi Oka is author of two books of poems: Salvage and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has received the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor's Prize in Poetry, and grants from the Leeway Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and VONA. She studies poetry at Warren Wilson.