Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a...
Katherine Agyemaa Agard is the eldest daughter of a zoologist and a botanist. At 18, she won, and declined, an Open National Scholarship in the Natural Sciences from the government of Trinidad & Tobago. Her interdisciplinary work is rooted in painting, performance, and writing. She holds an AB in Visual and Environmental Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard College and an MFA in Writing from UC-San Diego. KAA has received fellowships from Kimbilio, Lambda Literary, VONA/Voices, and Callaloo. She lives in San Francisco and is a dual citizen of Trinidad and...
Bahaar Ahsan is a writer, artist, and translator based in the Bay Area, with familial origins in the port city of Abadan in the south of Iran. Like any other tgirl, Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s) and aims to interrogate ontologies which separate the ideological from the somatic, the aural from the visual, rage from softness, homeland from host-land, past from present from future. Bahaar serves as a Contributing Editor and Resource Coordinator at The Operating System. Her writing appears in Tagvverk, Apogee, and elsewhere.
Ari Banias is the author of A Symmetry, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody, both from W. W. Norton. His work has been supported by numerous fellowships and residencies, and has been published in American Poetry Review, Triple Canopy, The Nation, Georgia Review, The New Republic, Hyperallergic, The Yale Review, and Bæst, among others.
Kaylan Black, 2021 and 2022 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate and a member of the National Society of High School Scholars. At the time of her Flash Poetry reading in April 2023, she had been accepted into 3 colleges early as a 17 year-old and Senior at Oakland Charter High School. She has been on the African American Honor Roll and Achievement, Honor Roll, and a Junior Community Organizer with ACCE.
William Brewer’s debut novel, The Red Arrow, is out from Knopf. It received the Silver Medal for First Fiction from the California Book Awards. His first book, I Know Your Kind, was a winner of the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared in A Public Space, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Sewanee Review, and other journals. Formerly a Stegner Fellow, he’s currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. He lives in Oakland.
Jennifer S. Cheng received her BA from Brown University, MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, and MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She is the author of: MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018), selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018”; House A (2016), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay (2010), an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. She is a National...
Poet, Playwright, Director, Associate Director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University
Maxe Crandall is Associate Director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. Maxe works at the intersections of transgender studies and experimental poetics and performance. His performance novel about AIDS archives and intergenerational memory The Nancy Reagan Collection (Futurepoem) was on the New York Public Library’s Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020, LitHub’s 65 Favorite Books of 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry.
He is a poet, playwright, and director; author of...