Chisom Anarah, a Nigerian poet and storyteller, weaves words with passion and precision. Educated at Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education Staff School and Kem’s College in Lagos, she earned a Mass Communication degree from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she served as copy editor for the university newspaper, The Record. Chisom is a ghostwriter, content writer for Benzone Development Foundation, podcaster, voiceover artist, editor, proofreader, and avid book reviewer.
Aida Bardissi is a doctoral student at NYU, where she researches Egyptian film of the mid-twentieth century and its concerted national project(s), specialising in race, indigeneity, and the faultlines of belonging. Her poetic work has been nominated for a 2026 Pushcart Prize, and finds a home in ANMLY, Mizna, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. She calls on you to devote yourself to the daily practice of liberation.
Jo Bear is a poet, scholar, and educator who received their MFA in poetry at North Carolina State University. They have an MA in Drama & Performance Studies from University College Dublin and are a 2023 Zoeglossia Fellow. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in Amsterdam Review, The Offing, Shō Poetry Journal, Channel, West Branch, The South Carolina Review, Blue Earth Review, Poetry Ireland Review, ROPES Literary Journal, and elsewhere.
Charles Caesar is an artist, editor, writer, and a longtime New Yorker. He’s originally from St. Petersburg, Florida. Charles creates imagery at the intersection of magical realism, timelessness, and the elevated-everyday. He began making photographs at an early age and graduated from the BFA Photography program at Parsons School of Design. His work has been published in places including New York Magazine, V Magazine, Interview, office, them, and Galerie. Charles produces zines under the label CMXXIV PUBLISHING.
Thandi Cai (MengCheng 梦城团 Collective) (they/them) is a queer, Indonesian, Chinese American artist from the American South exploring the futurities of Asian diasporic identity through critical dialogue, textiles, performance, film, graphic design, and print media. At the core of their creative and socially engaged practice is a desire to steer the world into a future that breaks free from the oppressive colonial systems of gender binaries, nation-states, and capital. The goal of their work is to arouse imagination, pleasure, and improvisation to ideate new paths forward. Cai is immersed in researching and riffing off of histories where they find themselves and other Asian Americans absent (despite their irrefutable presence) to fabulate speculative fiction in which they are centered. In 2020, Cai co-founded Meng Cheng Artist Collective in service of collective artmaking and dialogue in the Memphis community. They are currently collaborating with the Chinese Historical Society of Memphis & the Midsouth in the creation of Bluff City Chinese, a documentary about the expansive voices of the Chinese diaspora in Memphis.
Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, educator, and community artist who dreams, writes, and takes action toward a borderless world with rematriated lands. Their writing asks us to defy colonialism and nurture collective care in its place; it asks us who we are at our most free, and explores the subversions needed in order to arrive there. Their storytelling is rooted ancestrally in the lands of Puebla, México (Nahua) and the island of Kiskeya-Ayiti. Ayling is an Artistic Development Fellow and Teaching Assistant with The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. Their poetry has been featured in The Poetry Project, Yalobusha Review, The Seventh Wave, The Texas Review, Huizache, Alebrijes Review, Beyond Borders Literary Review, and elsewhere. Ayling is committed to nurturing collective creativity, and continues teaching art and writing workshops for community, installing and exhibiting interactive public artworks, and hyping up poets and artists at local open mics.
Nelson Gutierrez (b. 1968, Bogota, Colombia) holds a BA degree in Fine Art from the Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogota, Colombia and an MA degree in Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, UK. He worked as a professor in the Fine Arts Departments at the Universidad de los Andes and the Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano, in Bogota, Colombia. In 2002, he moved to the USA where he has kept developing and showing his artwork in addition to working as a Teaching Artist for different organizations such as Arts for Learning in Miami, FL, and Children’s Studio School in Washington, DC. During this time, he also attended the Corcoran College of Art where he did coursework in the MFA program. His work has been exhibited around the US and also internationally in Colombia, the UK, and Switzerland, and it is part of private and public collections. He lives and works in Memphis, TN.
Charlie Hart is an artist and writer from Miami, Florida living in Sofia, Bulgaria. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. His writing has appeared in The Florida Review, Sinking City, South Side Weekly, and elsewhere.
Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Deer feenix (Nightboat Books, 2027), Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), the chapbook I am Made to Leave I am Made to Return (No Dear, 2017) and a Belladonna chaplet (2021). She has been awarded fellowships from the Kresge Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Poets House, and Cave Canem, among others. Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest, selected by Bhanu Kapil. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Paris Review, POETRY Magazine, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. She has presented her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim Museum. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives in the United States. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University.
Taylor Jordan Holmes is a writer-poet and a current doctoral candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work inherits the priorities and longings of Black feminist theory and political and artistic practice, focusing broadly on Black mysticisms, representations of the occult in post-1965 Black women’s literature, and the neoliberal commodification of wellness and healing. Her creative/critical work has been published in The Black Scholar and Project Passage.
Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch (all pronouns) is a queer Iranian writer, editor, and scholar as well as a former reader for Split This Rock. Tala earned a PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley and is a graduate of VONA, RAWI’s SWANA Mentorship Program, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. Tala’s creative writing has appeared in the American Academy of Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Seventh Wave, Indiana Review, Epiphany, Meridian, and more.
Dylan McNulty-Holmes (he/they) is the author of the chapbook Survivalism for Hedonists (Querencia Press, 2023) and the longform digital poem Half a Million Mothers, which was shortlisted for the 2022 New Media Writing Prize. His writing has been made into a t-shirt, read at worker protests, and translated into five languages. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he’s been featured in journals including Foglifter, The Offing, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and Split Lip. Find him at dylanmcnultyholmes.com.
Althea Murphy-Price (b.1979, San Jose, California) received her BA in Fine Art from Spelman College, her MA in Printmaking and Painting from Purdue University, and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the country and internationally, including in Spain, China, Japan, Italy, and Sweden. She is included in multiple public collections such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, Knoxville Museum of Art, the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Brandywine Print Achieves, Fairfield University Art Museum, the Bush Art Center, Bernard A. Zukerman Museum of Art, and Gregory Allicar Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in such publications as Art Papers Magazine, Art in Print Magazine, Printmaking Today (UK), CAA Reviews Journal, Printmaking: A Complete Guide to Materials and Process, and Printmakers Today. Murphy-Price lives and works in Knoxville, TN, where she is a professor at the University of Tennessee.
The work of artist and teacher LiLi 丽丽 Nacht (MengCheng 梦城团 Collective) explores current issues through the spiritual framework of ancient traditions. Her practice, rooted in meditation as well as ritual, draws from Daoism and traditional 山水 (mountain water) ink painting. In this juxtaposition of present and past, LiLi 丽丽 utilizes a variety of media ranging from performance to painting to explore the complexities of chosen versus inherited national/sexual identities. Working primarily on a project-to-project basis, LiLi 丽丽 integrates historical research, interviews, personal narrative, and storytelling to generate intimate dialogue.
Erin Noehre (she/her) is a Black, queer, formerly incarcerated poet. She holds an MFA from Arizona State University, where she was a 2020-2021 June Jordan Teaching Fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Academy of American Poets, Foglifter, the anthology Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance, and elsewhere. She is currently a student in the Creative Writing Ph.D. program at the University of Cincinnati.
Kamelya Omayma Youssef is the author of A book with a hole in it (Wendy’s Subway, 2022) and a forthcoming mixed media poetry manuscript with 1080 Press. In addition to being a writer and editor with a bookmaking and performance practice, she has recently taught at The New School, CUNY, The Poetry Project, Bulk Space, Talking Dolls Gallery, and elsewhere. She currently curates events and an artist residency with City of Asylum in Detroit, while being on fellowship with Artists at Work. Originally from Lebanon’s Chmistar and Jibbayn, she was born and raised in Dearborn and has made homes of Detroit and New York City.
Shelby Pinkham is a queer, nonbinary, bipolar poet from Bakersfield, California. They earned an MFA at Fresno State where they taught composition and poetry. They have received fellowships from Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, Lambda Literary, and CantoMundo. Their writing has appeared in ANMLY, ctrl + v, Huizache, Honey Literary, and elsewhere.
Shaan Sachdev is a cultural writer and essayist based in New York City. He writes about thinking, flânerie, political bias, the military-industrial complex, and his two favorite divas: Hannah Arendt and Beyoncé. He’s recently written for The New York Times, The Point, The Drift, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His essay “Portrait of the Technocrat as a Stanford Man” won a Pushcart Prize in 2024.
Kashi Saloni is a South Asian writer, artist, and digital designer from New York City. Her writing has been published in AAWW’s The Margins, Same Faces Collective, Mister Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Dr. L. Eudora Pettigrew Women’s History Fellowship. She is asking you to pledge solidarity with the Palestinian people and to dedicate yourself towards intersectional liberation. Find her at k4shi.com or @kashi.saloni.
imogen smith is a poet & transsexual. She is the author of stemmy things & the forthcoming raw & zero, both from Nightboat Books. Fuck ICE. Free Palestine.
alma valdez-garcia is a trans poet / fiber artist / land worker from Northern New Mexico, currently located in Los Angeles, CA. Their work crosses worlds of land connection, dream weaving, & community care. They want ICE to vanish & believe in a Free Palestine.
Neena Wang 王媛 (MengCheng 梦城团 Collective) is a multimedia artist who works in ceramics, photography, video, painting, sculpture, and performance. Her work draws from an academic background in history and international relations to explore unseen connections across time, space, and the sensory landscape. As a queer femme of color living in a modern, globalized, and postcolonial environment, her existence rests on the edge of many borders and boundaries and she observes carefully how these facades are created and upheld. Her work seeks to make visible the nonlinearity of history and time, point to the deep entanglement of seemingly isolated events, and unsettle our collective human memory and imaginary.
Derek Yen writes code in the mornings and everything else in the evenings. He keeps returning to ideas of illness, technology, and speculative imagination. His writings have been published or are forthcoming in The Seventh Wave, Lucky Jefferson, A Velvet Giant, and No, Dear. He shares an apartment in Brooklyn with his partner, their dog, and several houseplants. Find him online at speculativeloaf.wordpress.com.
Dana Ysabel is a community organizer, poet, and public librarian living in Brooklyn. Their work is situated in the struggle against imperialism. They have received fellowships at the Poetry Project and Brooklyn Poets. Born in Manila, they have lived by the ocean their entire life.
Yidan Zeng 曽一丹 (MengCheng 梦城团 Collective) is a Chinese-American artist stitching together textiles and participatory performance towards an embodied practice of attention and care. Her works are continually woven webs with no center, seeking only to make tangible the invisible threads in our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. She currently works with food waste dyes, meditative rituals, found natural materials, and discarded objects, practicing the transformative magic of turning detritus into portals for connection.
