Shane Dutta is an Indian-American writer based in the United States. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from the University of Virginia and a certificate in creative writing from the University of California, Los Angeles Extension program. His work concerns trauma, gender, and postcolonial identities, and has appeared in various literary magazines.

Born and raised in LA’s East Hollywood neighborhood, daughter of Mexico City migrants, María Elena Fernández’s essays and poetry are published in the anthologies Somos Xicanas, Voices from the Ancestors and Remembering Frida. Her full-length solo shows include Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist and the poetry performance, Ancestral Body Navegante. She is one of the writers, performers and the artistic director of the Xicana monologues Fire and Corazon, presented in Los Angeles and in Mexico City in 2025. She was also a freelance writer for the LA Weekly. She teaches in the Chicana/o Studies Department at Cal State Northridge and appears in the PBS Latino history docu-series American Historia.

IG: @m.elena.fernandez
Facebook: @ma.elena.fernandez

Angela M. Franklin is an author, poet, and visual artist from Los Angeles, California. She holds an MFA from Antioch University. Social justice issues, and helping others find their voice are among her passions. Her work has appeared in a variety of anthologies; the most recent is 88 Unashamed Black Mental Health Stories, featuring poems about her brother's struggle with mental illness, and eventual death from it.

Andrea Cecilia Giugni (she/her) is a queer Venezuelan poet, editor, and translator. She serves as an editor for Ninth Letter and her work has been published in The Acentos Review, Euphony Journal, and the Abraxas Review, among others. She currently studies in the MFA program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where she lives with her partner and their two cats, Salem and Pancake. For updated information, please visit andreagiugni.com.

Brianna Jimenez is an Afro-Caribbean storyteller from the rural American South. With degrees in Communications and Interdisciplinary Studies—focusing on Diversity in Leadership and Caribbean Studies—she documents contemporary brown and Black experiences through poetry and film. She made HiBrow, a documentary mini‑series, and has since been named a VONA Poetry Cohort 2026 recipient, Martha’s Vineyard Creative Writing Institute 2026 Poetry Fellow, and Burnaway Art Writing Incubator 2026 participant. Jimenez reframes insider/outsider tension into a narrative of reclamation, using sharp imagery to capture the intersectional belonging of Southern peoples.

Bettina Judd (she/her) is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and theorist. She is a Cave Canem fellow (2007) and has had a residency at Vermont Studio Center. Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Torch, The Offing, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern, 2022) and patient. poems (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) which won the Hudson Book Prize in 2013.

IG: @bettinajudd
Bluesky: @bettinajudd.bsky.social
Website: www.bettinajudd.com.

Serena May is a multidisciplinary artist with transcultural roots in Hong Kong and the US. Through poetry, butoh dance and drawing, she trains to expand her ways of sensing and develop response-ability in our more-than-human world. Since studying with Q. M. Zhang, she has been holding an inquiry of diasporic re-membering as a descendant and future ancestor which she recently brought to the Liquid Cartographies festival in New York. She returned to her creative practice two years ago after a long hiatus, and this will be her first VONA workshop.

IG: @hybrid.zx

Elizabeth Pérez (she/her) is a Cuban American writer and associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She completed a 2025 VONA residency in lyric poetry and participated in the 2026 McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House) Winter Workshop. Pérez was a finalist for the 2024 Cardinal Poetry Prize and, in 2025, for the Alta California Chapbook Prize, Palette Poetry’s Nature Poetry Prize, and the Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest. Her poem “Independence Night" won the 2025 River Heron Editor’s Prize and she received honorable mention for Green Linden Press's 2026 Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation. Pérez is also the author of two award-winning books on Afro-Diasporic religions.

Website: www.elizabethperez.net
Bluesky: eperezphd.bsky.social
IG: @eaperezphd
Facebook: @eaperezphd

Kimberly-Fela is a Black and Brown Afro-Puerto Rican American poet of Brooklyn, NY. Their work—and many forms of play—centers Black, Brown, and Caribbean diasporic community, history, and culture alongside the universal experience of grief and the need for anti-oppressive and anti-capitalist repair. Their work is published or forthcoming in Forgotten Lands, Listen Journal and Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Jasmine Vallejo-Love is a disabled Afro-Puerto Rican American poet & writer raised in the boogie down Bronx and living in Los Angeles. Her writing engages social issues such as disability, mental illness, domestic violence, addiction, and sexual assault. She is a Diana Woods Memorial Award Finalist, Quippy Choice Award Winner, Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow, and was selected for PEN America’s Emerging Voices Workshop, the McCormack (f.k.a Tin House) Workshop, VONA, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has been anthologized and appears in journals including Pinch, SoFloPoJo, Mud Season Review, and Lunch Ticket. Engage her on IG/Threads @CafecitoWithJas, @jaspoet.bsky.social, or at VallejoLoveLife.com.

2026 CNP Award Recipient
A. E. Wynter is an award-winning poet, editor, and community organizer based in Saint Paul, MN. Her poems have appeared in audio trails and art exhibits throughout the state, including “I Too, Am America,” which showed at the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum February through June 2026. Her poems have also appeared, or are forthcoming, in Black Warrior Review, Torch Literary Arts, The Florida Review, New Millennium, and elsewhere. Wynter has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Mentor Series, VONA, and the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House), as well as various artist residencies. She is currently a 2025-28 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature.