Safia Elhillo, who is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, is the author of The January Children, Girls That Never Die, Home Is Not A Country, and Bright Red Fruit. Her work appears in Poetry, Callaloo, the Poem-a-Day series, The BreakBeat Poets, and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. She is coeditor of Halal If You Hear Me, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. A recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship, Elhillo won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.”

Fatimah Asghar, a poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer, is a South Asian American Muslim writer who cares less about genre and instead prioritizes the story that needs to be told and finds the best vehicle to tell it. They are the author of If They Come For Us, When We Were Sisters, and the chapbook After. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman fellow. In 2017, they were a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and were listed on Forbes’s “30 Under 30” list.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Whiting Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Osman’s poetry has been translated into over ten languages. Her images were exhibited by Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Arts Incubator, Furious Flower, and the New York African Film Festival. Her work as a director includes The Ascendants; Sam, Underground; and Sun of the Soil. She lives in New York.

Mahtem Shiferraw is a writer and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. She is the author of Fuchsia (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) which won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets; Your Body Is War (University of Nebraska Press, 2019); and Nomenclatures of Invisibility (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2023), as well as the chapbook Behind Walls & Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Founder and executive director of Anaphora Arts, she has been a jury member for various prizes and residencies. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has been anthologized widely. She holds an MFA from Vermont College.