CM Burroughs has been a fellow of Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and Cave Canem Foundation. Her debut book of poems is The Vital System, Tupelo Press 2012. Burroughs’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Best American Experimental Poetry, Ploughshares, jubilat, Callaloo, VOLT, and Bat City Review. Burroughs is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia College of Chicago. www.cmburroughs.com
Allen Forrest, graphic artist and painter, was born in Canada and bred in the U.S. He has created cover art and illustrations for literary publications and books. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University's Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation's permanent art collection. Forrest's expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas.
Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea González Poetry Award and most recently a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Hook: A Memoir is published by Augury Books. Randall is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Haven.
Ashaki M. Jackson is a social psychologist and poet who has worked with post-incarceration youth through research, evaluation, and creative arts mentoring for over one decade. She is a Cave Canem alumna. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Eleven Eleven, Rkvry Quarterly, pluck! and Prairie Schooner among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and is a poetry student in University of Michigan's MFA program. His writings have been given homes by The Journal, Word Riot, The Puritan, and River Styx, among others. You can find him online at marlinmjenkins.tumblr.com and @Marlin_Poet.
Quincy Scott Jones' work has appeared or is forthcoming in the African American Review, The North American Review, and The Feminist Wire. With Nina Sharma he co-created the Nor’easter Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series. His first book of poetry, The T-Bone Series, was published by Whirlwind Press in 2009.
Stacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (Ecco/HarperCollins) and was the primary contributor to two projects on New Orleans: *The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project* and McSweeney's *Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath*. She is the communications director for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, founder of Harlem Against Violence, Homophobia, and Transphobia, and the co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series. Her recent narrative nonfiction has appeared in *Apogee Journal*, *Callaloo*, *The Butter*, and is forthcoming in *The Florida Review*, where she was a finalist for the 2014 Editor's Prize in Nonfiction.
Saretta Morgan is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer.
Wendy S. Walters is the author of a book of essays, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande), and two books of poetry. Her work appears in The Iowa Review, Bookforum, FENCE, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Eugene Lang College of The New School University in the city of New York.
Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of five books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press, 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press, 2011) and Howell (Atelos Books, 2011). He is also the author of several chapbooks, including a prose eulogy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011). His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend/.