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

M.E. Macuaga (she/her) is a Japanese Bolivian storyteller and escape room addict whose diverse work can be read now/soon in HAD, The Cincinnati Review, Epiphany, Seventh Wave, Luna Station Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her communities include Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Tin House, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Storyknife.

Noelani Piters is a writer living in San Francisco. She was a 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize Poetry Finalist and a 2023 Molokai Arts Center Artist in Residence. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from Poetry Northwest, The Hopkins Review, Poetry, The Offing, swamp pink, and Pleiades, among other publications.

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 (she/her/ella) is a chicana in Chicago with roots in Michoacán and Jaliso. She recently completed her masters in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois-Chicago where her research explored erasures in Indigenous Mexican history. Influenced by the works of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Saidiya Hartman, and Édouard Glissant, she challenges traditional archival methods to tell stories that have long been overlooked. In addition to her nonfiction writing, she is currently working on a collection of speculative fiction stories set in her beautiful city of Chicago.

 In 2022, she was selected as an inaugural Nonfiction Fellow for the Roots. Wounds. Words. Storytellers of Color Writing Workshop. She has also participated in StoryStudio’s Essay Collection in a Year and Storyboard workshops. When she’s not procrastinating on writing you can find her exploring a new museum exhibit, visiting her favorite independent bookstores, or loudly singing along to Bad Bunny and Beyoncé.

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.