Celeste Guzman Mendoza is co-director and co-founder of CantoMundo. Her poetry and essays have been published in various anthologies and journals. Her first collection of poetry is Beneath the Halo, and her second, Coming in Waves, is forthcoming in 2015.

Raina J. León, Cave Canem and CantoMundo fellow and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous publications, including her collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols and Boogeyman Dawn. She co-founded the Acentos Review.

Urayoán Noel is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Albany and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at NYU. A 2013 CantoMundo fellow, his books of poetry include Kool Logic, Hi-Density Politics, and Los Días Porosos. He is also the author of a forthcoming study of Nuyorican poetry.

Amalia Ortiz, a performance-poet and playwright, has appeared on three seasons of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO and the NAACP Image Awards. She was awarded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation grant and writing residencies at the National Hispanic Cultural Center and Hedgebrook.

Benjamin Alire Saenz is a poet, fiction writer, and young adult novelist. He is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and an American Book Award winner. His latest offering, a collection of short stories Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club was the recipient of the 2013 PEN Faulkner Award for fiction. He is the chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso.