Li Yun Alvarado is a poet and educator. Her poetry has been published in several journals including The Acentos Review, MiPOesias, PALABRA, PMS poemmemoirstory, and Kweli Journal. She has assisted with coordinating Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud reading series, and is pursuing her doctoral degree in English at Fordham. She lives in New York City and takes frequent trips to Salinas, Puerto Rico to visit la familia. To learn more, visit her website at: www.liyunalvarado.com
Dennis Barton serves as Vice Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing. He coordinates their Speakers Bureau and co-facilitates the Panim el Panim Life Skills Empowerment Program. In addition to working as a Peer-Educator in the Education Department of Planned Parenthood, he is an active member of Middle Collegiate Church and an Ordained Deacon in the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of New York.
F. Douglas Brown has been an educator for seventeen years and currently teaches English at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all boys Jesuit school. He is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, two organizations that celebrate and cultivate African American and Asian American poets, respectively. When he is not teaching or writing or being a daddy, F. Douglas Brown spends his time DJing around the greater Los Angeles area.
Julie Choffel’s poems have appeared in Mrs. Maybe, Make/shift, and Caketrain, among other places, and her first book, The Hello Delay, won the 2010-2011 Poets Out Loud Prize. A native of Austin, Texas, she currently lives in eastern Connecticut, where she teaches creative writing and pretends to be the boss of a toddler.
Rachel Gray was born and raised in rural Nevada. She holds an MFA from Indiana University and a BA from Whitworth University. She loves packed dance floors, too much sunshine and eating good food. Lots of good food. Her work appears in the anthology Walang Hiya Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice. She is a Kundiman fellow.
Susan Celia 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.
Victor Addo Kwansa is a Harvard Law graduate from Riverdale, MD. He received a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University in 2008. While at Yale, he co-founded WORD, a performance poetry group. His poetry has been featured in Essence magazine and Yale's student publication Sphere. In 2008, his essay about on-campus racial issues was included in a booklet for incoming Yale freshmen. In 2010, he was featured in The Root's online gallery of up-and-coming artists and entrepreneurs. He has performed at schools, community centers, and even once while visiting a former slave camp in Ghana, his parents' home country.
BeBe Khue Jacobs was born in Saigon, Vietnam and grew up in New York. She attended the University of Virginia and received her masters’ degree in Architecture. She has lived and worked extensively in Asia and now resides in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons. She specializes in photographing weddings, portraits and events. She also works with the Chinese American Museum on their annual Lantern Festival organizing and leading the Arts & Crafts workshops. She curates a yearly art show “Sacred Memories: A Cross Cultural Celebration of the Day of the Dead” for the City of Los Angeles.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza poet from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Juárez, México. She is an MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico and managing editor for Blue Mesa Review. Her work has most recently appeared in Cream City Review, The Minnesota Review, The Acentos Review, and Bellevue Literary Review.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books, 2008), Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. Twelve of her poems appear in Exquisite History:The Land of Wandering: Poems & Prints (The Printmakers Left, University of Virginia Press, 2005) and numerous anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2008. She is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (Trilobite/University of North Texas Press, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press/University of Virginia, 1983), and is editor of Acquainted With the Night:Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999) and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of VirginiaPress, 2008). A new collection of poems, Vanitas, Rough, will appear from Persea Books in fall 2012,and a collection of her essays will be published by Drunken Boat Editions later that year. Her work has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Denver Quarterly, Image, The KenyonReview, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Virginia Quarterly Review,The Yale Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar is the founder and Director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English, an Advising Fellow,and the winner of an All-University Teaching Award (2009), a Harrison Award for UndergraduateAdvising, and a Mead Honored Faculty Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for2009 / 2010, the 2009 Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a 2010 Outstanding Faculty Awardof the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and the Carole Weinstein Poetry Award for2011. She serves as poetry editor for the Brainstorm blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education Review.
Jennifer Tseng’s book The Man With My Face (AAWW 2005) won the 2005 Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Beyond Margins Award. Her work has appeared in various journals, most recently Bateau, Hotel Amerika and Ploughshares. Chinese translations of her new work recently appeared in the Beijing journal Dear Whistle and another poem alongside its Chinese translation appears in the current issue of PEN America. She works at the West Tisbury Library on Martha’s Vineyard and is the poetry editor of Martha’s Vineyard Arts & Ideas.
Sharon Dennis Wyeth is a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow and children's book author. An African American with Tikar DNA, she was among the first of that tribe's enslaved to be officially welcomed home by the nation of Cameroon.