Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas Press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he will release the book A Little Devil In America with Random House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta is an associate professor at the City University of New York-BCC. Her first book of poetry, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, is an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist, and it is forthcoming from Get Fresh Books in 2021. Recent work can be found in Best American Poetry, The Baffler, Acentos Journal, Kweli Journal, Red Fez, Gathering of the Tribes Magazine, In Full Color, Paterson Literary Review, MiPoesias, Short Plays on Reproductive Freedom, and Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader. She is a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet, a Macondo Fellow, and the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity, an anthology that features over Latinx 30 contributors and subjects. Her work focuses on her Afro-Latinx and indigenous ancestry, queer identity, the punk and house music subcultures, her birthplace of Chicago, and the destruction of post-colonial neoliberalism in educational environments.

Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue and the chapbooks 7 x 7: kwansabas and THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali. Tara received her Ph.D. at Binghamton University and her MFA from New England College. In addition to performing her poems across the country and internationally, Tara’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including POETRY, Gathering Ground, Bum Rush the Page, Villanelles, both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies, The Break Beat Poets, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements and GHOST FISHING: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology.Tara has taught writing at Rutgers University, Binghamton University, and University of Illinois-Chicago. She is a Cave Canem alum.

Tony Bolden is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at University of Kansas. He is the author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture and Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk. His current research includes a book project tentatively titled “Knee Deep: The Funk Ethos in Black Writing” and a collection of autobiographical essays based on his experiences working in black community-based art collectives in pre-Katrina New Orleans. Bolden is Editor of The Langston Hughes Review. You can learn more about his work on funk by visiting his website: www.phunkativity.org.

Ochy Curiel is a professor of Gender Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She is an Afro-Dominican feminist, lesbian, anti-racist, and decolonial singer/scholar/activist who has been at the forefront of contemporary Afro-feminist movements throughout Latin America. 

A writer, vocalist and performance/sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Diggs has presented and performed at California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center and at festivals including: Explore the North Festival, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; Hekayeh Festival, Abu Dhabi; International Poetry Festival of Copenhagen; Ocean Space, Venice; International Poetry Festival of Romania; Question of Will, Slovakia; Poesiefestival, Berlin; and the 2015 Venice Biennale.  As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium.  Diggs has received a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a Whiting Award (2016), and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She lives in Harlem.  Photo by Willy Somma

Lise Esdaile teaches writing-intensive courses at Lehman College. She has taught at the Eugene Lang School and the Bayview Correctional Facility for Women, which was part of Bard College's Prison Initiative Program. Her areas of interest include feminist/womanist literature and theory; African-American literature and theory; the African-American detective in film and fiction; and cinema studies, with a focus on horror and the intersection of literature and film.

Mariposa María Teresa Fernández is an award-winning Afro Puerto Rican poet, spoken word performance artist, visual artist, educator, activist, scholar and Bronx native. Her poetry has been published in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, The Afro Latin@ Reader: History & Culture in the United States, Manteca: Anthology of AfroLatin@ Poets, Bumrush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam and Latinas: An Anthology of Struggles and Protests in 21st Century USA. She has been featured on HBO Latino in the critically acclaimed series Habla Ya! and Americanos: Latino Life in the U.S. Mariposa has performed throughout the United States & abroad, including Cuba, Germany, and South Africa.  Mariposa has served New York City as a teaching artist and has taught creative writing for numerous public schools and non-profit organizations. A member of the NYC Latina Writers Group, she has also led poetry workshops at the Sankofa Sisterhood Writers Retreat for BIPOC women. Mariposa is a CUNY faculty member and teaches at Herbert H. Lehman College in the Women and Gender Studies Program and the Africana Studies Department, as well as the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York. Mariposa is a proud recipient of the 2020 CUNY Adjunct Incubator grant and working on a project documenting stories of neighborhood and community resilience in the South Bronx.  Photo by: Alyssa Peek

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, director, and the author of four collections of poetry, A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom (Birds, LLC, 2019) and the audio-book version of A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom (Birds, LLC, 2020), Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2017), Go Find Your Father/ A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2014) and Negro League Baseball (Fence Books, 2011). She founded and runs Afrosonics, an archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics, and Mythscience a publishing imprint that reissues and reprints work from the archive. She worked on the SOS, the selected poems of Amiri Baraka, transcribing all of his poetry recorded with jazz that had yet to be released in print and exists primarily on out-of-print records and she is now editing a collection of his plays. Harmony studied Rhetoric and at UC Berkeley and taught for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. She received her MFA from Columbia University and has received the Motherwell Prize from FenceBooks, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a NYFA fellowship. She is currently completing a book of poems called M a à f a and an accompanying collection of essays and memoir, Love is War for Miles, as well as a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln. Her work is deeply rooted by Black music, and collective improvisation with Black people, in the tradition of her father who was a Northern Soul singer and songwriter and introduced her to artists he worked with like Ray Charles, The Staples Singers, and Bobby Womack.

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, educator, cultural activist, anthologist, and recipient of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize and is the author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and three full-length collections and five chapbooks.  She co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women (1978) and THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009).  Her poems are widely anthologized most notably in  Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin: BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, 2016 and WORD: An Anthology by A Gathering of Tribes and Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters Today, and in The New Yorker, www.darkmatterwomenwitnessing.com and The Brooklyn Rail. Essays, colloquies, and interviews are published in Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry;  The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent;  and print and online journals including The Black Scholar, Bomb, for Harriet at The Poetry Foundation,  www.tribes.org; The Poetry Project Newsletter, Rumpus, and The Writers Chronicle. 

Tyehimba Jess is a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, and has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

The Last Poets are several groups of poets and musicians who arose from the late 1960s African-American civil rights movement's black nationalism. The name is taken from a poem by the South African revolutionary poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, who believed he was in the last era of poetry before guns would take over. The original users of that name were the trio of Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain, and David Nelson.

Rodney Terich Leonard is the author of Sweetgum & Lightning (Four Way Books, 2021). His poems have appeared in BOMB, Four Way Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cortland Review, HIV Here & Now, and other journals. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and lives in Manhattan

Sequoia Maner is a poet and assistant professor of African American literature at Spelman College. Her writing has been published in The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, and other venues. She is a co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2020). She is at work on a manuscript regarding Kendrick Lamar's album To Pimp a Butterfly for the 33 1/3 series.

Trapeta B. Mayson is the city of Philadelphia 2020-2021 Poet Laureate. She is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in Literature, Leeway Transformation Award, Leeway Art and Change Grant, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grants. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow and a 2019 Aspen Words Emerging Writer’s Fellow with the Aspen Institute. She is the author of She Was Once Herself and Mocha Melodies. Trapeta also released two music and poetry projects, SCAT and This Is How We Get Through, in collaboration with internationally acclaimed jazz guitarist, Monnette Sudler. Her other publications include submissions in The American Poetry Review, Epiphany Literary Journal, Aesthetica Magazine, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry among others.

Dr. Tanya L. Saunders is a sociologist interested in the ways in which the African Diaspora throughout the Americas uses the arts as a tool for social change. They hold a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Master of International Development Policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Dr. Saunders’ books include Cuban Underground Hip Hop, as well as a recently published chapter in No Tea, “No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.” For those of you who read/speak Portuguese, check out their essay Epistemologia negra sapatão como vetor de uma práxis humana libertária. Dr. Saunders is currently working on a forthcoming documentary short about Black Feminist Activism in Cuba.

Monnette Sudler loves music by classic jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino, and Bolo Sete. She continues to be inspired by her family, colleagues, and the communities where she has either lived or been of some service. Monnette grew up listening to Nat King Cole and the Motown sounds. Her first teacher was a positive influence that taught folk music of different eras, Paul Simon, Richie Havens, Joni Mitchell, and Mississippi Reds. Later Monnette was influenced by the music of John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Wayne Shorter, and Miles Davis.

Hank Williams currently teaches in the Departments of English and Africana Studies at Lehman College. His regular courses are Contemporary Urban Writers, Intro to Africana Studies, Fieldwork in the African American Community, and African American History. His research focuses on the Black Arts and Black Power Movements of the 1960s-70s and the intersection of art, politics, and sound.