Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of four books of poems, a novel, and a chapbook. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-CUNY.

Amaranth Borsuk is a poet working across media platforms. Her most recent book is Pomegranate Eater. Previous books include Handiwork; and the collaborations ABRA, As We Know, and Between Page & Screen. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics Program at the University of Washington, Bothell.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of original fiction-essays on black presences in film, literature, and visual arts. Her writing lives where genre, form, archival research, memory, race, and subjectivity intersect. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Tracie Morris holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and a PhD in performance studies from NYU. Her most recent book is handholding: 5 kinds. She is coeditor of Best American Experimental Writing. Morris is coordinator of the MFA in Performance and Performance Studies at Pratt Institute.