George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are an editor at large with Mizna where they also lead curation and editing of the Mizna Online literary space. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, the Arab American National Museum, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and National Performance Network, and are a 2024 Litowitz MFA+MA graduate of Northwestern University. Currently, George is co-editing a Palestinian global anglophone poetry anthology with Noor Hindi and holds the Writer-in-Residence faculty position at Amherst College’s English department.

Lana Barkawi, Ph.D., is the executive and artistic director of Mizna where she also serves as the publisher of Mizna: SWANA Literature and Art and producer of Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. Under her leadership, Mizna has grown to become an award-winning organization with a national and transnational impact.

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest whose debut poetry collection HOMES was a finalist for several awards and explores nature, modernity, identity, belonging, and sublimity through the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland. He has presented work at literary, art, and public spaces around North America and abroad with support from diverse institutions and his academic and professional experience spans education and the arts. Moheb is an editor at large with Milkweed Editions and is the new executive editor and literary program director at Mizna, with over a decade of involvement in the organization's work.

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.