zakia henderson-brown is of starshine and clay lineage. She is the winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and her manuscript What Kind of Omen Am I, selected by Cate Marvin, is forthcoming in the spring of 2018. She was a 2016 Poets House Emerging Poets fellow, and has received additional fellowships and support from the Fine Arts Work Center, Callaloo Journal, and Cave Canem. Her poems have appeared in African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Day One, North American Review, Vinyl, Washington Square Review, and others. She currently serves as associate editor at nonprofit publisher The New Press and lives in her native Brooklyn.

Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press). A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Fine Arts Work Center, Millay Colony, Hedgebrook, Poets House, and the Vermont Studio Center. A winner of the 2016 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry and a 2017 recipient of the Barbara Memorial Fund Award for Poetry; Manick serves as East Coast Editor of the independent press Jamii Publishing and is Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Her poem "Things I Carry Into the World" was recently made into a film by Motionpoems, a organization dedicated to video poetry. Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, African American Review, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Clockhouse, Human Equity Through Art (HEArt), Kweli Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, St. Ann’s Review, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017) and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), both with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and she has written essays and book reviews for Boston Review, LA Review of Books, and Poetry Daily, among others. A 2017-2018 fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, she also teaches poetry at the 92Y and serves on the Executive Board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu is most recently the author of Phrasis (Fence, 2017), winner of the Ottoline Prize. The recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and widely elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, teaches in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Columbia University, and is poetry editor for Hyperallergic.