Ocean Vuong is a writer, professor, and photographer. He is the author of The New York Times bestselling poetry collection, Time is a Mother, and The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, which won the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, The New England Book Award, and has been translated into 39 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Myriam Gurba is the author of several books. Her most recent essay collection, Creep: Accusations and Confessions, is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Paris Review and the Believer. She enjoys solving crossword puzzles and binge watching Real Housewives.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.

Dominique Christina is an award-winning poet, author, educator, and activist. She holds five national poetry slam titles in four years, including the 2014 & 2012 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. Her work is greatly influenced by her family's legacy in the Civil Rights Movement and by the idea that words make worlds. Her fourth book, Anarcha Speaks won the National Poetry Series Prize. She was recently appointed Arts Envoy by the U.S State Department and made her first trip to Cyprus in that role in the Spring of 2023.

Patricia Smith (she/her) has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an NAACP Image Award, and finalist for both the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House, 2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House, 2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House, 2005), a National Poetry Series selection. In 2021 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Shayla Lawson is the author of A SPEED EDUCATION IN HUMAN BEING, PANTONE, I THINK I’M READY TO SEE FRANK OCEAN, THIS IS MAJOR: NOTES ON DIANA ROSS, DARK GIRLS & BEING DOPE (Harper Perennial, 2020) and HOW TO LIVE FREE IN A DANGEROUS WORLD: A DECOLONIAL MEMOIR (Tiny Reparations, 2024). They have written for Bustle, Romper, Salon, Tin House, PAPER, ESPN, Salon, Guernica, Vulture, The Cut and New York Magazine, been awarded fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Artist Colony, and a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle and LAMBDA Literary Award. They’re from Lexington, Kentucky but they’ve lived everywhere.

Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States.

Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.

Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing and serves as Director of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of four collections, most recently Roadmap: A Choreopoem and How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem. Her poems and essays appear in national and international literary journals, and as one of the foremost choreopoem scholars, Prince writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation.

Kwame is a husband, father, writer, a New York Times bestselling author, a former pharmaceutical metrologist, and a publisher with Freedom Fire Books, an imprint of Disney-Hyperion. His debut middle-grade novel, TRISTAN STRONG PUNCHES A HOLE IN THE SKY was awarded a Coretta Scott King Author Honor, and it—along with the sequels TRISTAN STRONG DESTROYS THE WORLD and TRISTAN STRONG KEEPS PUNCHING—is published by Rick Riordan Presents/Disney-Hyperion. He is the co-author of LAST GATE OF THE EMPEROR with Prince Joel Makonnen, from Scholastic Books, and the editor of the #1 New York Times bestselling anthology BLACK BOY JOY, published by Delacorte Press. A Howard University graduate and a Midwesterner now in North Carolina, he survives on Dad jokes and Cheezits.

Mahogany L. Browne, a Kennedy Center's Next 50 fellow, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, Rauschenberg, & Wesleyan University. Browne’s books include Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky (optioned for Steppenwolf Theater), Black Girl Magic, and banned books: Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, and Woke Baby. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne currently tours Chrome Valley (highlighted in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times).

She is the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center and works on her first adult fiction in Brooklyn, NY.