Briana Gwin embraces multitudes as a queer, neurodiverse, Afro-Latina hybrid creative and multicultural Citizen. She has received fellowships from VONA, the ACES Society for Editors, Anaphora Arts, and Roots. Wounds. Words. Her words appear in Midnight & Indigo, Seventh Wave, Guernica, an anthology called “On Gaming,” and elsewhere. She currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with three hairless cats and a plethora of books and houseplants.

Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American refugee poet, literary scholar, and sewist. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in 2026. Poems appear/are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Waxwing, Minnesota Review, Wildness, and elsewhere. She is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). Raised in Virginia, she now lives in California's Central Valley and teaches literature at UC Merced.

Website: mai-linhhong.com
Bluesky: @FleursduMai.bsky.social
Instagram: @continentaldrift_poems

Keana Aguila Labra (they/them/she/her) is a queer Cebuana Tagalog Filipinx genre- and genderfluid/non-binary poet, editor, playwright, and writer in diaspora residing on stolen Ohlone Tamyen land. 

Vina Orden is a writer based in Lenapehoking/New York City whose work has appeared in Asian Journal, CUNY Forum, The FilAm, The Halo-Halo Review, hella pinay, Hyperallergic, and The Margins. As senior poetry editor at Slant’d magazine, Vina supports and amplifies other emerging Asian American writers. She is a 2025 VONA Poetry Residency Fellow and has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kweli, Roots. Wounds. Words., and Tin House. She also is working on her first novel for young adults.

Elizabeth Pérez (She/Her) is a Cuban American writer and associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has authored two award-winning books on Afro-Diasporic religions, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (2016) and The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract (2023). Her poems have appeared in several journals and two anthologies, including El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (1997), edited by Martín Espada and the recipient of a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. In 2024, Pérez was a finalist for Wesleyan University Press’s inaugural Cardinal Poetry Prize, for the manuscript Lessons in Cuban Cosmology: Fifty-Two Poems & a Villanelle. She was also among the finalists for Gunpowder Press’s 2025 Alta California Chapbook Prize, for her collection Refugee Lotteries.

Website: www.elizabethperez.net/
Bluesky: eperezphd.bsky.social
Instagram: @eaperezphd
Facebook: www.facebook.com/eaperezphd/

Kashiana Singh is a poet, immigrant, corporate leader, and grandmother who grounds her daily existence within Work as Worship, which was also the theme for her TEDx Talk.

Her chapbook Crushed Anthills (Yavanika Press) traces a 10-city poetic journey. Her full-length collections Woman by the Door (2022, Apprentice House) and Witching Hour (2024, Glass Lyre Press) explore thresholds of womanhood, resilience, belonging, and transformation. Her newest, Dualities of Albireo, has just been released from The Poetry Box.

Based in North Carolina, she serves as Managing Editor of Poets Reading the News, President of the North Carolina Poetry Society, and Program Ambassador for Matwaala. A 2025 MVICW Fellow, Kashiana also teaches workshops rooted in poetry, food, ancestry, and memory.