Victoria Newton Ford is a poet from Memphis, Tennessee. She is a MacDowell and Lambda Literary Fellow, and her work has been supported by TORCH Literary Arts, Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, and The Hurston/Wright Writers Workshop. She earned her B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on her first manuscript about Black mothers and their daughters, captivity, and haunting. She resides in Washington, D.C.

Varun Gauri’s fiction addresses migration, marriage, and other causes of madness. Born to Punjabi Partition survivors, he was gratified with his contented life in an agreeable Ohio suburb — until he recognized he wasn’t. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and acknowledged in Best American Nonrequired Reading. His gainful employment includes research on behavioral economics and global poverty and teaching at Princeton University.

Ashlee Green (she/they) is an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at George Mason University. They have written for NPR, the Washington Independent Review of Books (WIRoB), HuffPost, and The Rumpus. Green was named a 2023 Cheuse Fellow and will spend the month of July in Norway and Iceland, researching Nordic bathing and sauna culture.

Monique Hayes is a fiction author, poet, and screenwriter from suburban Maryland. A Callaloo and Hurston/Wright Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of Maryland College Park. She's the recipient of an American Antiquarian Fellowship, an Eccles Visiting Fellowship (British Library), a Rubenstein Library/John Hope Franklin Center Travel Grant, a Ruth Stone House BIPOC Scholarship and a Maryland Independent Artist Award. She was an inaugural winner of the Courage to Write Grant (the deGroot Foundation). Her work has been short-listed for the Historical Writers Association Dorothy Dunnett Story Award, the Alexander and Dora Raynes Poetry Prize, and the Eyelands International Prize.

Manuela Silvestre is a writer currently based in Washington, D.C. She’s held 25 addresses in the last 23 years, and done work for almost as many industries. She graduated from New York University with a degree in English Literature, despite spending most of her time taking Latino Studies and Creative Writing classes. Her work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly among others.