Kwame Dawes is author of eighteen collections of poetry, two novels, several anthologies, and plays. He has won a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Emmy. At the University of Nebraska he is a Chancellor's Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner.

Tsitsi Jaji is a poet and literary critic. Currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, her chapbook is forthcoming, and her first scholarly book, Africa in Stereo, was recently published.

Warsan Shire is a London-based Somali poet. Her debut pamphlet is Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth. Her poems have appeared in Wasafiri, Magma, and Poetry Review, and they have been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. She is the winner of the 2013 Brunel University African Poetry Prize.

Ladan Osman has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Michener Center for Writers. Her work has appeared in "American Life in Poetry," Narrative, and Prairie Schooner. Her poems will appear  in a new-generation African poets anthology from Slapering Hol Press.

Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and scholar and the author of the collections The Dream in the Next Body, The Museum of Ordinary Life, and A Hundred Silences. She received the Daimler Award for South African Poetry in 2005. www.gabeba.com.