Afaa Weaver

Afaa Weaver’s many poetry collections include The Plum Flower Trilogyand Spirit Boxing, and he is the author of many plays, including Berea.

Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Brynn Saito

Brynn Saito is the author of Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press, and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times and American Poetry Review among other journals and anthologies. She was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Brynn lives in Fresno, California, where she is an assistant professor at California State University, Fresno, and codirector of the Yonsei Memory Project. 

Amber Flame

Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist, and educator whose work explores spirituality and sexuality, cross-woven with themes of grief and loss, motherhood and magic, and the interstitial joy in it all.

Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Douglas Manuel

Douglas Manuel received an MFA in poetry from Butler University and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. His first collection of poems, Testify, won an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry, and his work can be found in numerous literary journals, and magazines, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is a Bayard Rustin Fellow at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-residency MFA program. 

Francesca Bell

(Moderator) Francesca Bell is a poet and translator. Her debut collection, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her work appears widely in literary journals, and she has received a Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle and an Honorable Mention in Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. Bell grew up in Washington and Idaho and did not complete middle school, high school, or college. She lives with her family in Novato, California.

Photo Credit: Emily Petrie