Malik Thompson is a queer African-American person from Washington, D.C. His work has been published in The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and residencies from organizations including Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, Anderson Center, and Monson Arts.

Jesslyn Whittell is a poet interested in the queer pastoral, air pollution, and eighteenth-century literature. She’s the author of the chapbook Slow Tapping to Help You Sleep [ASMR] (Bottlecap, 2023), and her recent poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Annulet, Indiana Review, Discount Guillotine, and Action, Spectacle. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at Scripps College.

Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials. She has also published Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; the fiction collection My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and the poetry collections Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant.

Anaïs Deal-Márquez is a writer and artist based in Minneapolis. Her work looks at migration, home, and memory. She has been published in Poetry, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Yellow Medicine Review, The Acentos Review, Huizache, Pleiades, and more. Deal-Márquez was a semifinalist for the 2026 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in poetry. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, Mirrors & Windows, VONA, and Tofte Lake Center.

Cintia Santana’s debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023), received the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, the Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal in Poetry, and the North American Book Award’s Silver Medal, and was short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award. Santana teaches translation, poetry, and fiction workshops in Spanish and English at Stanford University.

Ginny Threefoot’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, The Cincinnati Review, Cream City Review, Nimrod International, Plume, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, VOLT, and West Branch, among other journals. Her work has been exhibited in collaboration with artist Anne Lindberg at Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago; Haw Contemporary in Kansas City, Missouri; and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa.

P. Q. R. Anderson is the author of four volumes of poetry: Night Transit (Dryad, 2023), In a Free State: A Music (uHlanga, 2018), Foundling’s Island (University of Cape Town Writers Series, 2007), and Litany Bird (Carapace, 2000). He is the recipient of the Sanlam Literary Award and the Thomas Pringle Award. An academic memoir, On the Frontier, will be published in 2026 with Jacana Media. He lectures in English at the University of Cape Town.

Craig Bernardini’s stories and essays have appeared in AGNI, Conjunctions Online, The Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, and many other journals. His collection 12 Oxen under the Sea (2025) won the New American Fiction Prize. He teaches English at Hostos Community College in the Bronx and lives in the mid–Hudson Valley with his partner.