Anastacia-Renee is Civic Poet of Seattle and former 2015-2017 Poet-in-Residence at Hugo House. She is a hybrid genre writer, workshop facilitator and multivalent performance artist. She is the author of four books: Forget It (Black Radish Books), (v.), (Gramma Press), Answer(Me) (Argus Press), and 26 (Dancing Girl Press) and her poetry, prose and fiction have been published widely. *Book of the Month: The Racial Imaginary, Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind

Tommy "Teebs" Pico is a poet from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation. He authored the books IRL, Nature Poem, and Junk, & myriad keen Tweets including “Sitting on the Cock of the Gay.” He is co-curator of the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, and co-host of the podcast Food 4 Thot. His Myers-Briggs is IDGAF.

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher, Cave Canem Fellow, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Kweli, Bomb Magazine and others. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The African American Review, Gulf Coast, Vinyl, Muzzle, RHINO, Poetry and others. She was a 2015 Center for Fiction Fellow and the Poetry Project’s 2016 Emerge-Surface-Be Poetry fellow. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over is available from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA in creative writing, from American University. His work has appeared in such literary journals as The Little Patuxent Review, Mythium, The Tidal Basin Review, and Vinyl online. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera and NPR as well.  In May of 2014 he was also the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant. He is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland. His debut collection of poetry , Wisdom Teeth, was released in April 2011 on Busboys and Poets Press/PM Press. You can follow him on social media on Facebook and on Instagram @theoriginalDerrickWeston Brown.