Nazima Ali was born in 1972 in Trinidad & Tobago.  She attended school in Trinidad where she received her diploma in the five basic subjects of Math, English, Social Studies, Science and Spanish. She then immigrated to the United States in 2001. In 2006, she received her GED from Brooklyn Adult Educational School.  She is now residing in Manhattan with her three children. She is going back to school to become a Certified Nursing Assistant at ABC Training Center in the Bronx. 


Rosebud Ben-Oni is a playwright at New Perspectives Theater, where she is currently developing a new play, Shamhat, for part of their 20th Anniversary Season. She is a co-editor for Her Kind at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Recently, her short story “A Way out of the Colonia” won the Editor's Prize at Camera Obscura: A Journal of Contemporary Literature and Photography. Her work appears in Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture, Review Americana, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature.


Laressa Dickey is a poet, dancer, and somatic worker. Born in Tennessee, she received her MFA in 2005 from the University of Minnesota, and now lives in Berlin.


Susan C. Greenfield's fiction has appeared in Cimarron Review, Room, and Talon Online Magazine.  She is the author of Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen(Wayne State, 2002; paperback 2003), and the co-editor of Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865 (Kentucky, 1999). Her scholarly articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Eighteenth-Century Studies, PMLA, and ELH. 

 


Tung-Hui Hu is the author of three books of poems: The Book of Motion (2003), Mine (2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, Gastronomica, and Martha Stewart Living Radio, and he has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and the University of Mississippi, among other places. Hu teaches poetry and film/media studies at the University of Michigan, where he is assistant professor of English.


Sally Wen Mao is an 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar and a Kundiman fellow. Her work is published or forthcoming in ACM, Cream City Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Post Road, Sycamore Review, and West Branch, among others. She teaches writing and pursues her MFA at Cornell University.


Ivan de Monbrison was born in Paris in 1969 to a French Protestant father and an Egyptian Muslim mother, both mixed with Jewish origins. His interest in art can be linked to a very liberal artistic education, where African and Oceanian arts were in the center of his interests. This left him with a desire to pursue the question of what art meant in the old days, and how this can be dealt with in our modern and absurd world of thriving technology. Is art religious? Thus, in which way can in it still be in a non-sacralized world? Chasing the human figure in a distorted way, like Bacon and Giacometti did in the past, has appeared for him the best way for this non-religious "spiritual" quest. It has appeared to get even more important as art has tended to become more and more similar to publicity and fashion nowadays. Ivan's works have been shown in the recent years in various countries. His website is http://artmajeur.com/blackowl.


Ranjani Murali received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University, where she taught creative writing, English, and composition. Her poetry, nonfiction, and translations have appeared in Pratilipi, Phoebe, Elimae, Cricket Online Review, Kartika Review, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of Vermont Studio Center's Kay Evans Poetry fellowship and a nonfiction fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.


Nandini Nessa is a writer, youth educator, and performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in 1982 to Bangladeshi immigrants in Carbondale, Illinois, she lived in a handful of Southern states before settling in New York. Her writing has appeared in Escape into Life, Thought Catalog, Dash Literary Journal and Brooklyn Bodega; her play, Nayana's Passing, debuted at Dixon Place's HOT! Festival in 2005. She received her B.A. in Women’s Studies from Vassar College, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. After working as a youth organizer and Artistic Director of the Bushwick Youth Theater with Make the Road NY, she received the American India Foundation's Service Corps Fellowship, and moved to New Delhi, India, to continue her youth work. Currently, she remains committed to both her artistic and social justice pursuits. While performing with The Sugaran Tour, a caravan of South Asian female artists, she is the Manager of Teen Programs for the national non-profit Step Up Women's Network, where she works with under-resourced teenage women of color on their creative and academic success.


Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, Lucky Fish, from Tupelo Press. Awards for her writing include an NEA Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia.


Craig Santos Perez is from Mongmong, Guåhan. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent (Hawai’i Dub Machine, 2011), and author of two collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010), a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize for Poetry and the winner of the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. He received his MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, where he teaches Pacific Literature and Creative Writing.


Jennifer Presant was born in New York City, in 1971 and currently lives and works in Evanston, Illinois. She received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1993 and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2002. Jennifer has had recent solo/duo exhibitions at Linda Warren Gallery, Chicago (2010-11); Blank Space Gallery, New York (2011); and Eden Rock Gallery, St. Barths, F.W.I (2010). Her work is in various private collections, most notably the Howard Tullman collection, from which her work was included in a curated show on Contemporary Realism, at the Mobile Museum of Art. She is the recipient of the Prince of Wales Fellowship, the National Arts Club, O. Aldon James, Jr. Award and has received fellowships to attend the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in various publications, such as American Art Collector, New American Paintings No. 80, Flavorpill Chicago and her reviews include The Chicago Sun Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Portland Phoenix. Interviews with the artist have been published in Poets and Artists Magazine and Whitewall Magazine. Presant is represented by the Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago.



Patricia Smith is the author of six acclaimed poetry volumes, including the upcoming Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (April 2012); Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. Her work has been published in Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and the 2011 editions of both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She is a professor at the City University of New York and serves on the faculties of the Stonecoast and Sierra Nevada College low-residency MFA programs.