April 3, 2025
Maurya Kerr (she/her) is a bay area-based writer. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and appears in multiple journals. Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Recent honors include winning Rhino Poetry's 2024 Editor's Prize, second place in Palette Poetry's 2023 Resistance & Resilience Prize, and first place in the 2022 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She is author of the chapbooks MUTTOLOGY and tommy noun (winner of the 2022 C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Award).
Vincente G. Perez is a decolonial poet and scholar working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop studies, and digital culture. He pushes the limits of theory through a poetics that treats decolonization as a tangible reality and consciousness as a material that poetry can mold otherwise. He is a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program and a Poetry and the Senses Fellow (2021) at UC Berkeley. His debut chapbook, Other Stories to Tell Ourselves (Newfound 2023), won an Eric Hoffer finalist award. He will be a 2024 Tin House Autumn workshop participant. His poems have appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Obsidian, Third Coast, Poet Lore, Honey Literary, and more.
D'mani Thomas (he\they) is a writer, and creative from Oakland, California (Ohlone territory). They are currently obsessed with surveillance and intimacy. They have received fellowships from UC Berkeley’s Art & Research Center via The Engaging the Senses Foundation, The Watering Hole, Foglifter and others. In 2023, they became a finalist for the Penrose Poetry Prize and were awarded a California Arts Council grant through Youth Speaks. His work can be found in The Shade Journal, Oroboro Lit Journal, KALW 91.7 FM, The Auburn Avenue, The Ana, and elsewhere. D’mani’s debut chapbook, “Grown-up Elementary”, is now available through Black Lawrence Press. Outside of poetry, catch them studying horror movies, dancing, and eating too many fries.
