Diana Marie Delgado is the Executive Director of Hugo House and has more than twenty years of experience working in not-for-profits focused on advancing social justice and the arts. Her first collection, Tracing the Horse, was a New York Times Noteworthy Pick. Her chapbook, Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust, was the 2018 Center for Book Arts winner and she has published poetry in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, New York Times Magazine, Colorado Review, and Tin House. Delgado received her bachelor’s degree at UC Riverside and her MFA at Columbia University. Her selected honors and awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Breadloaf, and the James D. Phelan Foundation. She is a member of the CantoMundo and Macondo writing communities.
Poet, novelist, journalist, activist, and critic Luis J. Rodriguez was born in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley of East Los Angeles. He served as the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles from 2014–2016. Rodriguez is recognized as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, and has received numerous awards for his work. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, among others. Rodriguez has also founded or co-founded numerous organizations, including the Tía Chucha Press, which publishes the work of unknown writers, Tía Chucha's Centro Cultural, a San Fernando Valley cultural center, and the Chicago-based Youth Struggling for Survival, an organization for at-risk youth.