Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His latest book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and daughter of California. She has a MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral student in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her debut collection of poems, the monumental misrememberings, was published by Co-Conspirator Press in 2020. She was chosen for Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices for poetry in 2021, and is currently a creative fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco.

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones is a poet & parent in Oakland, CA. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, & Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. They are an Assistant Poetry Editor at Foglifter Press, a journal curating queer and trans voices, and have fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, VONA/Voices, & Kearny Street Workshop. They are currently an MFA graduate fellow at Mills College.

Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. He was a recipient of the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, American Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review and others.

Meilani Clay is a conscious writer, educator and poetry slam champion from the San Francisco Bay Area. She emerged as part of Youth Speaks, a youth performance poetry and creative writing program founded in 1996, and served on SPOKES (Selected-Poets-Organizing-Kreating-&-Expanding-Spoken Word), a Youth Advisory Board and paid internship program. Clay also taught in an academic enrichment program, formerly known as Summerbridge National, which caters to urban youth with high potential but limited resources. She was a Bay Area representative at the Ninth Annual Brave New Voices (BNV) International Youth Poetry Slam Contest in New York City. Clay graduated from Howard University with a degree in English, and was a contributing editor for the university’s Amistad literary magazine.