SAM CHA was born in Korea, and earned an MFA at UMass Boston. A poet, essayist, teacher, and translator, he's been widely published and anthologized: he holds the dubious distinction of being (to date) the only poet listed in the Pushcart Prize index credited with a title that begins with "Motherfuckers." His 2018 chapbook, American Carnage, is available from Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. The Yellow Book, his 2020 full-length collection of cross-genre work, is nominally available from [PANK] Books, but the press is being run into the ground by an owner/editor who doesn't respond to emails, so unfortunately Amazon is your best bet.  Long a resident of Cambridge, he now lives in Brooklyn with his family.

IMANI DAVIS is a queer, Black, & neurodivergent writer from Brooklyn. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, The Mellon Foundation, Lambda Literary, StoryStudio Chicago, and the Stadler Center for Poetry, they’re currently a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Harvard, where they also earned their M.A. in English. Imani holds a B.A. in English and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania as well.

Imani’s poetry appears with The Academy of American Poets, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, PBS News Hour’s Brief But Spectacular Series, The Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Shade Literary Arts, The Offing, Brooklyn Poets, Poetry Daily, Frontier Poetry, Honey Literary, TEDx, ROOKIE Magazine, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

Notably, they have performed at the Teen Vogue Activism Summit, the Apollo Theater, Brave New Voices, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kelly Writers House, and the Nuyorican Poets Café.

SHANGYANG FANG grew up in Chengdu, China, and composes poems both in English and Chinese. While studying civil engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he realized his bigger passion lies in the architecture of language and is now a poetry fellow at Michener Center for Writers. He is the recipient of the Joy Harjo Poetry Award and Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. His name, Shangyang, originating from Chinese mythology, was a one-legged bird whose dance brought forth flood and rain.

JULIA STORY is the author of Post Moxie, The Trapdoor, Julie the Astonishing, and Spinster for Hire. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and her work has appeared in many publications including Diode, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, and The New Yorker. She is from Indiana and now lives in Massachusetts.

RAISA TOLCHINSKY is the author of the poetry collection Glass Jaw (Persea Books, 2024), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize (2023). She has published poems in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Raisa earned her M.F.A. from the University of Virginia and her B.A. from Bowdoin College. She was the 2022–2023 George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School.

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