Wisteria Deng is a poet, performer, and clinical psychologist whose work explores grief, migration, queer intimacy, and the many forms healing can take. She is the Founding Artistic Director of Vermilion Theater, a multilingual arts organization creating performances and community workshops at the intersection of storytelling and collective care. Drawing from her background in clinical psychology and palliative care, she is interested in how poetry and performance can linger in the messiness of being human: loss and longing, memory and migration, and the constant attempt of finding home. Her debut chapbook, Goodbye Eurydice, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Natalie J. Graham, a native of Gainesville, Florida, earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida and Ph.D. in American Studies from Michigan State University. Graham is an award-winning poet and performer. Her poetry collection, Begin with a Failed Body, was selected by Kwame Dawes for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Graham served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Orange County, California. In August 2024, she joined the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as a professor in Africana Studies and currently serves as the Department Head.

Mylo Lam was born in Vietnam and lives in Los Angeles. He and his family are refugees from Cambodia. Mylo’s work has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Nightboat Books, Mānoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His multimedia work won Palette Poetry’s Brush & Lyre Prize, his poetry won Blood Orange Review's Emerging Writers Contest, and his chapbook AND NOT/AND YET was published by Quarterly West. He has attended residencies with Sesame Workshop, VONA, and Kenyon Review. He has an M.F.A. in Poetry from Randolph College and Ed.M. from Harvard University.

2026 PAWA Scholar
JP Legarte (he/she/they) is a genderfluid Filipinx American student on the poetry track in Emerson College’s MFA program who is writing and experimenting against colonialism and empire. He serves as the Community and Grant Development Assistant and a Senior Editor for Brink Literacy Project and F(r)iction, as the Director of Creative Operations and Secretary for Collections of Transience, and as a Co-Editor-in-Chief for Shaved Ice Collective. Her work appears in Rawhead Journal, Breakwater Review, and other publication avenues. She has been supported by scholarships and fellowships from the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Martha’s Vineyard Summer Writers’ Conference, and similar programs.

IG: @jpl091

2026 Counter Narrative Scholar
Meredith Nnoka (they/she) is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. She is the author of Les Portes, winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize. Meredith has a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

IG: @eternityblues

Kandala Singh is a writer and researcher from New Delhi. She is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a Dietrich fellow. Her poems appear or are forthcoming from Plougshares, Rattle, Frontier Poetry, Southeast Review, and The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City, among other places. Her writing has won fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sangam House International Writers' Residency, Community of Writers and Hudson Valley Writers Center. She reads poetry for Ploughshares. You can find her chasing clouds, flowers and poems at https://www.kandalasingh.com.

Phoenix Soleil is a Haitian American writer, poet, facilitator, and trainer based in Berkeley, California. Her writing explores identity, trauma, spirituality, liberation, and the ways people transform pain into connection and possibility. She is currently working on a poetry collection and Sedular, a long narrative poem in verse that reimagines the epic tradition through a postcolonial lens.

Phoenix’s work has appeared in Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time, Tikkun Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches Nonviolent Communication, mediation, and conflict resolution, and her professional work centers empathy, repair, and building communities where people can be more fully human with one another.