Maricel Goris is a Queer Afro-Latina emerging writer and the eldest daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. As a writer, she brings her lived experiences to light dancing between her two languages to share emotionally complex and beautiful journeys. Maricel is currently drafting a memoir about a daughter who chooses estrangement for liberation. In October 2024, she presented at the Furious Flower IV Black Poetry Conference on the panel: Sister Scribes of the Sanctuary's Literary Feast. In May 2025, an excerpt entitled Encuentro Amparo en Green Street from her memoir-in-progress Unmotherly Love: A Queer Feminist Afro-Latina Memoir was published in "Palabras del Alma" a bi-monthly publication series from the Dominican Writers Association. Maricel is excited to learn from author Jamie Figuroa and build community at VONA Summer 2025 Residency, as she completes her manuscript.

Instagram: @maricelgoris
Website: maricelgoris.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/maricel-goris
BlueSky: @maricelgoris.bsky.social

Meredith L. King (she/her) is a creative nonfiction writer, and playwright based in Cleveland, OH. Her writing engages Black kinship, and uncomfortable truths. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Anaphora Arts, The Rumpus, and NPR. She is mom to a sassy Bichon named Stokely. meredithlking.com

Born and raised in Tokyo, M.E. Macuaga is a Japanese Bolivian storyteller and escape room nerd whose diverse work can be read or soon in The Cincinnati Review, Epiphany, Seventh Wave, HAD, Oyster River Pages, Luna Station Quarterly, and elsewhere. A finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship, the NYC Midnight competitions, and The Florida Review Editors’ Award in Creative Nonfiction, among others, M.E.’s communities include VONA, Tin House, Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Jentel Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, International Thriller Writers, Sisters in Crime, and Storyknife. She holds a Creative Writing BA from Stanford University and an MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and lives in California with three sweet humans and two cats, Mimi and Potato. Find her at curiousstoryprods.com, @memi_writes, and @memi-writes.bsky.social.

Noelani Piters is a writer living in San Francisco. A recipient of fellowships from Indigenous Nations Poets and PEN America, she was a finalist for the 2025 James Welch Prize and the 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize in poetry. Noelani was a 2023 Molokai Arts Center Artist in Residence and has received scholarships and support from Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Kearny Street Workshop. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from Poetry Northwest, The Hopkins Review, Poetry, The Offing, Epiphany Magazine, swamp pink, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Website: noelanipiters.com
Instagram: @noelanipiters

Elica Sue (she/her) is multi-racial and multi-ethnic educator and writer who is excited to return to VONA for the second time. Her nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Christian Science Monitor’s The Home Forum, The Gravity of the Thing, and Canary. She is a life-long resident of Southern California.

Cristina Mendoza Texcahua is a second-generation Latina with roots in Jalisco and Michoacán. She holds a master’s degree in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois Chicago. She is an alum of the Roots. Wounds. Words. Storytellers of Color Writing Workshop and StoryStudio’s Essay Collection in a Year and Storyboard programs. Her writing weaves memory, erasure, migration, and myth to explore the silences that shape personal and collective histories. She is currently working on an essay collection and a speculative fiction novel based in her amazing city of Chicago where she lives with her husband and four cats. You can find her online @xtonson.

Gina K. Velasco (she/her) is a Filipinx American queer feminist writer, teacher, and scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality at Haverford College. Her first academic book, Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2020) received an Honorable Mention for Best Book in Filipinx American Studies from the Filipino Section of the Association for Asian American Studies. She is co-editor, with Dr. Karen Buenavista Hanna, of the book Beyond the X: Queer and Trans Filipinx Studies (in progress). She is currently writing a multi-genre memoir. Based in Philadelphia, she enjoys exploring the city’s green spaces and vibrant arts culture.

Website: www.ginakvelasco.com
Twitter: @drginavelasco
Instagram: @peabodycat

Adela Wu (she/her) is a second-generation Chinese-Taiwanese American, neurosurgeon, writer, and illustrator, who currently lives in the Bay Area. She has published science writing in NPR through the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship as well as in ABC News. Her other creative works also appear in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, CLOSLER, Consilience, and Stanford Medicine Magazine, for which she has won national recognition for personal essay-writing through AAMC and CASE. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir.