heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, second-generation Colombian immigrant, poet, artist, scholar, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), which won the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her creative work has been published, exhibited, and performed in As/Us, Pank, Raspa, Word Riot, Feminist Studies, Huizache, the National Queer Arts Festival, The Sick Collective, the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, SomArts, and Galería de la Raza, among other places. She was a semi-finalist for the 2017 92-Y/Unterburg Poetry Center Discovery Contest, and a semi-finals judge for the 2017 Youth Speaks/Brave New Voices National Poetry Slam Competition. Born in Arizona and raised in California, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
Zefyr Lisowski is a trans & queer Southerner, the author of Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and a Pisces. She’s a poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal and has received support from Tin House Writers Workshop, Sundress Academy for the Arts, The CUNY Graduate Center's Adjunct Arts Incubator Grant, and elsewhere. Zef's work has appeared in Muzzle, DIAGRAM, Literary Hub, Nat. Brut., and The Poetry Project Newsletter, among other places. She lives in New York and at zeflisowski.com.
Grace Shuyi Liew is the author of Careen (Noemi Press, 2019), which has been named Electric Literature’s “14 Unmissable Poetry Books of 2019” and Entropy Magazine’s “Best Poetry Books of 2019.” Born and raised in Malaysia, a former colony of The British Empire, Grace thinks closely of migration, loss, sexuality, violence, and nation states. Her work has appeared in West Branch, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, cream city review, PANK, The Wanderer, and elsewhere. She is a Watering Hole fellow. Her other honors include the Lucille Clifton Poetry Fellowship from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Aspen Summer Words scholarship, resident writer at Can Serrat in Barcelona, resident at Agora Affect in Berlin, Vancouver Poetry House’s “10 Best Poems of 2016,” Ahsahta Press Chapbook Prize 2016, and others. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Hamilton College, and MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University. She is a Contributing Editor for Waxwing. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her second book of poetry, a book-length transnational epic poem, will be forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2020. She teaches for Brooklyn Poets and is working on a novel.
John Manuel Arias is a gay, Costa Rican and Uruguayan writer back in Washington, DC after many years. He is a Canto Mundo fellow & alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His work has found homes in The Kenyon Review, Assaracus, Akashic Books, Platypus Press & many more, with work forthcoming in F(r)iction, The Offing, and PANK. He has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net three times. Before DC, he lived in Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.