Author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020) Joy Priest is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, as well as the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Atlantic, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated. Her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South, and Best New Poets 2014, 2016 and 2019. Joy is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets, forthcoming from Sarabande Books.

Nigerian poet and essayist Gbenga Adesina is the author of Painter of Water (Akashic Books 2016). A haunting meditation on intimacy in the face of war and historical violence, Painter of Water was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Series. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, and the New York Times. He was a Goldwater Fellow at NYU, where he received his MFA and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He has received fellowships and support from the Fine Arts Work Center, Callaloo, Poets House, and Colgate University, where he was the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow. He is the winner of the 2020 Narrative Prize.

Queer poet and artist from Bangalore, India, Sanam Sheriff’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Academy of American Poets, The Offing, Vinyl Poetry & Prose, Black Warrior Review, Kewli Journal, Shade Literary Arts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and has received support from the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, The Watering Hole, Pink Door, and The Seventh Wave, and is a Pushcart Prize Nominee. Poetry is her closest translation.

Writer and artist from New Orleans, Bernardo Wade tries at poems & rides his bike around Bloomington, IN, because IU funds his present period of studying with others. He currently serves as Associate Editor of Indiana Review. He is a Watering Hole Fellow. He also moonlights as an equity and justice advocate. His words are published or forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, and others.

Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, Taylor Byas is a Yates scholar third-year PhD student at the University of Cincinnati as well as an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She was the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm (Variant Literature 2021) and her debut full-length I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is forthcoming in Spring 2023 from Soft Skull Press. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency. Check out her chapbook here →