Matthew Shenoda is the author of the poetry collections Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone, Somewhere Else, and the forthcoming Tahrir Suite. He is currently associate professor and associate dean of the School of Fine & Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago.

Chris Abani's prose includes Song For Night, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections include Sanctificum, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, and Kalakuta Republic. He is a professor at the University of California Riverside and the recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN/Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN/Hemingway Book Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

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.

Tjawangwa Dema is a poet, former chair of the Writers Association of Botswana, and she is an Honorary Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa. A founding member of her country's spoken word movement, she previously hosted an annual poetry festival and produced a CD anthology of twelve Botswana poets.

Warsan Shire is a London based Somali poet. Her début 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.