Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist and educator, whose work garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Baldwin for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and more. A former church kid from the Southwest, Flame’s work first collection, Ordinary Cruelty, published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame’s second book, apocrifa, is a love story told in verse of a non-gendered lover and their beloved, and launched May 2023 from Red Hen Press. She is at work on a film and an album, both launching soon. Amber Flame is a queer Black dandy mama who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.

Babz Rawls Ivy is a nationally recognized blogger and social media thought leader. Editor-in-Chief of Inner-City News, one of two Black print publications in New England, and host of the LoveBabz LoveTALK show on 103.5 WNNH-LP Community Radio, she is also a popular podcaster and frequently sought-after guest for local and national radio, television, and podcasts appearances. Babz holds a B.S. in Marketing from Barber-Scotia College, a Historically Black College in Concord, NC. She is a National Urban Fellow with a Master in Public Administration from Baruch, City University New York. Babz is also a certified Spiritual Director at Mercy Center, School Of Spirituality & Practicum.

CHISARAOKWU. (she/her) is an Igbo American X-disciplinary poet-artist, retired pediatrician, and 2023 California Arts Council Fellow. She has been honored with fellowships and residencies from Anaphora Arts, MacDowell, Cave Canem, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Her writings appear in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Urban Activist, Obsidian, The Washington Post, The New England Journal of Medicine, and elsewhere. Her anthro-poetic approach to poetry utilizes spiritual, oral, and print archives of Africa and its diaspora to reveal its traumas, rituals, and joys. Find more of her work at www.chisaraokwu.com.

Danielle Buckingham, affectionately known as Dani Bee, is a Chicago-born, Mississippi-raised writer and creative based in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2021 Lambda Literary fellow, Dani’s work has been published in Midnight & Indigo Literary Magazine, MadameNoire, Raising Mothers, and elsewhere. When Dani isn’t writing or tending to her plants, you can find her talking Black spirituality, growing up in Mississippi, and pop culture on the Hoodoo Plant Mamas podcast.

Dannie (she/her) is a poet from Washington, D.C. Her work is featured in Toho Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, and her debut chapbook, *Inside the Orb of an Oracle*, is published with C&R Press and received the 2019 Summer Chapbook Prize. Dannie is an inaugural cohort member of SeaSalted Honey’s writing residency in Senegal, West Africa. She has developed a loyal client base of entrepreneurs, students, artists, and applicants as a freelancer and is passionate about providing quality writing and administrative services to each of them.

Kai Harris is a writer and educator from Detroit, Michigan, who uses her voice to uplift the Black community through realistic fiction centered on the experiences of Black girls + women. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, What the Fireflies Knew, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and selected as a Marie Claire Book Club pick, amongst other honors. Kai resides in the Bay Area with her family, where she loves to hike and visit the ocean—and where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Clara University.

Leslie T. Grover is a writer and activist. Born in the Mississippi Delta, she is a Black Southern writer through and through. Her novella, The Benefits of Eating White Folks, was published by Jaded Ibis Press in April 2022. Most recently, her short story “Pie Crust” appeared in Waxing and Waning Literary Journal’s Blackout Edition. She is managing editor for PushBlack, an organization dedicated to uplifting Black identity through Black history storytelling, and she founded a small nonprofit, Assisi House, that uses the power of storytelling to enact social justice for marginalized communities. Leslie currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Lisbeth White is a writer and ritualist living on S’klallam and Chimacum lands of Port Townsend, WA. Her writing ethos orients at the sensual and sociopolitical intersections of healing, ancestry, mythopoetics, and connection to the natural world. Her debut poetry collection, American Sycamore (Perugia Press) was Finalist for the 2023 First Horizon Book Award. She is co-editor, along with Tamiko Beyer and Destiny Hemphill, of the anthology Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power (North Atlantic Books), and a founding member of the Red Thread Writers Collective, supporting PGM writers in rural Washington state.

Marrion Johnson is a Black, queer writer based in Oakland, California. Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Marrion uses his fiction to explore Black freedom, memory and ancestral healing. In 2021, Marrion received his MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California. He is currently working on his debut novel.

Mia S. Willis is a Black queer poet, popular educator, and cultural historian from Charlotte, North Carolina. Their poetry has been featured by The Slowdown, Palette Poetry, The Offing, the minnesota review, and others. Mia has received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, La Maison Baldwin, The Watering Hole, Lambda Literary, and Chashama’s ChaNorth. They are the author of monster house. (Jai-Alai Books), the 2018 winner of Cave Canem’s Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Mia’s debut collection, the space between men, is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series Competition and will be published by Penguin in fall 2024.

As a writer, educator, and energy worker, Natasha Elle Thomas bridges the realms of social justice, feminism, healing arts, spirituality, and radical transformation. She specializes in the reclamation of ancestral practices, rituals, and wisdom traditions for personal and collective healing and liberation. Natasha's writing has graced various publications. She is a Teaching Artist-in-Residence for Michigan Arts Access, promoting arts accessibility for youth with disabilities, and with the Race, Equity, Arts, and Cultural History (REACH) Initiative, which aims to establish a national model for arts education in U.S. schools. For a full bio and links to her work: www.natashathomasonline.com.

Sherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an Alkymist of the I-Magination, finding expression through poetry, interdisciplinary arts, workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. They have published and showcased work in various publications and exhibitions, and published four chapbooks. Sherese also has received grant awards from Queens Council on the Arts, NYFA and NYSCA, and residencies from WorksonWater, LMCC and Akademie Schloss Solitude. For more info: https://linktr.ee/sheresefrancis

Sondra Rose Marie (she/her) is a non-fiction writer who inspires others to see the world—even if only a tiny sliver of it—in a new light. She does this by intertwining threads from her own life as a neurodivergent Black lesbian with more extensive conversations around race, mental health, death, and queerness. You can find Sondra’s writing in Tagg Magazine, ZORA, Human Parts, and a myriad of blogs across the internet. When she’s not writing, she explores Southern California with her wife, watches horror movies, and reads poetry and romance novels on her apartment balcony.

Vic R. Collins (they/them) is a queer, Black trans nonbinary writer, educator, and community organizer from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, currently making a home in the Bronx. They hold an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from The New School and a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Mississippi. Vic was selected as a VONA Voices Creative Writing Fellow in 2023. Their work has appeared in Electric Lit, In These Times, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Raising Mothers Magazine, and Hippocampus.

Zabe Bent is a Black, Jamaican, New Yorker based in Atlanta. She writes essays, family sagas, and speculative fiction. Zabe is trained as a city planner and transport engineer, with a focus on safe, sustainable, equitable urban mobility. She now balances design and policy work with slow travel, as she completes her debut novel.

tavonne s. carson is a lover and a writer. Her writing is rooted in the liberation of her literal and literary voice through the medicine that is story. She explores anxiety, [in]/visibility and vulnerability in essay and memoir. In visceral, lyrical language, her creative nonfiction highlights (and dismantles) how Black girls and women are silenced, and learn to silence themselves. tavonne holds an MFA from the New School and is a proud alumna of VONA/Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation. She is working on a collection of essays and a screenplay for her inner-child.