Moderator: Marlena Chertock has two books of poetry, Crumb-Sized: Poems and On That One-Way Trip to Mars. She uses her skeletal dysplasia as a bridge to scientific poetry. Marlena is a bisexual poet and serves on the planning committee for OutWrite, Washington, DC’s annual LGBTQ literary festival.

Eileen Cronin’s Mermaid, translated in 3 languages, was one of O Magazine’s Best Memoirs of the Year. She’s held fellowships with Vermont Studio Center and American Psychological Association. She won the Washington Writing Prize in fiction. She's a writing instructor and a psychologist at UCLA.

James Tate Hill is the author of Academy Gothic, winner of the Nilse Prize for a First Novel. His work has appeared in Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, Waxwing, and Hobart, among others. He is the fiction editor for Monkeybicycle and a contributing editor for Lit Hub, where he writes a monthly audiobooks column.

T. K. Dalton's writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and appears in Apogee, The Millions, Southeast Review, Tahoma Literary Review, The Common, Radical Teacher, and elsewhere. He recently completed work on The Intimate Register, a memoir for which he is actively seeking representation. A founding editor of The Deaf Poets Society, a digital journal publishing disability literature and art that will publish its ninth issue this spring, Tim has taught writing at the college level since 2005. He holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently earning a PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.