Frederick Speers is the author of So Far Afield, a finalist for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Forklift, Diode, Salamander, Portland Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his husband and their two dogs in Denver, Colorado.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi, an associate professor of English at Cornell University is the author of Mrs. Shaw, Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, Logotherapy, and The Rise of the African Novel. He is the cofounder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Writing and the Global South Project-Cornell.

Jacob Strautmann is the managing director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University where he also teaches creative writing. He was a recipient of the Massachusetts Artist Fellowship in Poetry.

Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist. Her second book, Women in the Waiting Room, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is poetry editor at the Drum and teaches at Amherst College.

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of four novels: Banshee, Blind, Big Girl Small, and Repeat After Me, and a memoir: Foreign Babes in Beijing. Her poetry collection, Two Menus, is forthcoming. She has been published in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Ploughshares and is a professor at UChicago.