Lauren K. Alleyne is author of Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), and coeditor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). She is assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and professor of English at James Madison University.

Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US and UK, most recently No Ruined Stone. Her work appears internationally and has been translated into multiple languages. She teaches at Penn State University and in the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and was the 2021–22 Penn State Laureate.

Vladimir Lucien is a poet, critic, and actor from St. Lucia. Lucien's work has been published widely, including in the PN Review, Poetry International, Washington Square Review, Wasafiri among others. He was the 2015 winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers' Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her memoir, How to Say Babylon, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster (August 2023).

Malika Booker's poetry collection Pepper Seed was longlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre prize. Winner of the Forward Poetry single poem prize and a Cholmondeley Award, she is currently a creative writing lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.