t’ai freedom ford, winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry for her book & more black from Augury Books, is a New York City high school English teacher and editor at No, Dear Magazine. She is also the author of how to get over from Red Hen Press and her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Poetry and others. Her poetry has been anthologized in A Body of Athletics edited by Natalie Diaz, The Break Beat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Nepantla: An Anthology of Queer Poets of Color and others. t’ai has received awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, Camargo Foundation, The Center for Fiction, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, Kimbilio, New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Poetry Project. In 2019, t’ai became a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship inaugural fellow. She was also a finalist for the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and finalist for the 2020 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, New York.

Nicole Santalucia is the author of Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians (Bordighera Press, 2026), The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books, 2020), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press, 2018), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press, 2015). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize, the Arkana Literary Review Editor’s Choice Award. Santalucia is a Professor of English, the Director of First-Year Writing, member of the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council, and she serves on the steering committee of the Institute for Social Inclusion at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania where she received a Faculty of the Year Award and the Gender Study Program’s Vagina-Warrior Award for fostering inclusiveness. Santalucia has led poetry workshops in the Cumberland County Prison, public libraries, Boys & Girls Clubs, nursing homes, the YWCA, LGBT Center of Central Pennsylvania’s GSA Summits, and she’s the founder of The Binghamton Poetry Project (now called The Binghamton Writers Project).

Laura Cronk, is a poet and essayist and is the author of two books from Persea Books: Ghost Hour (2020) and Having Been an Accomplice (2012), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her poems, essays and interviews have appeared in anthologies and publications including the Best American Poetry series, the Academy of American Poets, Big Other, The Bennington Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Curator, Iterant, Lit Hub, The Literary Review, Public Seminar, and WSQ. She was the founding poetry editor for The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food and is currently an associate editor with Tupelo Quarterly. For many years she curated the Monday Night Poetry Series at KGB Bar. She has presented panels on reframing the writers' workshop and the ethics of writing nonfiction. In her teaching practice, she is especially interested in collaborative pedagogical methods. Her work supporting writers at The New School has included programming The Summer Writers Colony, the Writing & Democracy Honors Program, and the BA in Creative Writing. She is a member of the feminist writing collective The Matrix.