May-lee Chai is the author of the American Book Award-winning story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants and ten other books. Her prize-winning short prose has been published widely, including in the New England Review, Missouri Review, Seventeen, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The recipient of an NEA fellowship in prose, Chai is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
Belle Boggs is the author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, a finalist for the PEN / Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Mattaponi Queen, which won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, including, most recently, Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. A Colorado State University professor, her honors include an American Book Award, NEA fellowships, and NAACP Image Award nominations.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She is also the author of The New York Times bestselling illustrated collection of nature essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions, 2020), which was selected as Barnes and Noble’s 2020 Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. Her honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. In 2021, she became the first-ever poetry editor for SIERRA magazine, the storytelling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Tracing memory threads Lauret Edith Savoy’s life and work: unearthing what is buried, re-membering what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she writes about the stories we tell of the American land’s origins and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her books include Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape; The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World; Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology; and Living with the Changing California Coast. Trace won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the 2017 ASLE Creative Book Award, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Orion Book Award. Lauret is the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies and Geology at Mount Holyoke College, a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, a photographer, and a pilot.
Arisa White is the author of Black Pearl, Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, A Penny Saved, and the Lambda Literary Award–nominated You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened. Her chapbook “Fishing Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, she curates cultural events and artistic collaborations that center narratives of queer and trans people of color. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she is an assistant professor at Colby College.