Nahshon Dion is a multi-talented writer and teaching artist from Altadena, California. Published in LGBTQ anthologies and journals, Nahshon speaks to discrimination and violence black and brown LGBTQ youth face. Nahshon has created a uniquely personal work turning her anguish into art that touches on mental health, gun violence, and state terrorism. She’s the recipient of dozens of grants, fellowships, artist residencies, honors, and awards totaling over $100,000 that provided ammunition and support towards developing and creating her gutwrenching forthcoming memoir "Shootin’ Range". Nahshon’s literature shows how youth can reach their full potential and shine when their rainbow is blurred.
FAYLITA HICKS (she/they) is a writer and activist defying the boundaries of genre & medium, race & gender, policy & people through dynamic storytelling. They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, a 2021 Shearing Fellow with Black Mountain Inst., and the Poet-in-Residence with Civil Rights Corps. Their fellowships and residencies include Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Lambda Literary, Tin House, the Right of Return USA, and others. Their work is featured in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Huffpost, Longreads, Poetry, Slate, Texas Observer, Yale Review, and others. #BadBxtchPoetry #CommunitiesNotCages #AbolitionNow
Danielle Monique (she/they) is a Black queer nonbinary woman originally from South Texas, now living in Minneapolis. In 2018, she graduated as a first-generation college student with a B.A. in English and Africana Studies from Mount Holyoke College. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program (fiction) at the University of Minnesota. She has short stories in Joyland and Malarkey Books, a forthcoming creativ nonfiction piece in Black Femme Collective, and a Pushcart-nominated prose poem in Doubleback Review. She is editor-in-chief of Stellium Literary Magazine, which centers Black queer creatives. Her work can be found at daniellemoniquewrites.com
Chibuike Ogbonnaya recently completed a collection of thematically linked short stories featuring women, feminine gay men, transvestites, and gender queer. They obtained a combined honors in English and Literary Studies and History and International Studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Chibuike is an alumni of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop. Their work has appeared in or forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Stellium, Akuko Magazine, and elsewhere. When they are not busy writing, they are doing drag shows on their WhatsApp status or publicly writing letters to their husband. You can find them on Twitter @ChibuikeOgbon15.
Sunah Nash is an 18-year-old writer from Newark, New Jersey. She is a lover of stories, whose proudest writing accomplishment is receiving a 100% mark from the toughest undergrad literature professor of all time. (She’s deadass). She writes essays, fiction, and poetry and believes moments and feelings have souls, and a writer's job is to listen and translate them into words. Sunah is an active writer in her local arts community and a member of the Black Girl Magic Writing Fellowship with Urban Word NYC. She studied Black history and developed her craft for four years at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York as a part of the Junior Scholars Program. Sunah is a sophomore in college and plans to double major in Fine Arts and Anthropology when she transfers schools in 2022. Find her at @sunahnashart.
Taneasha White is a Black, Queer lover of words, inquisition, and community, and has used her role within both literary and organizational spaces to make room for folks who are often cast aside. She is the Founder and Editor of UnSung Literary Magazine, a flash fiction and poetry publication focused on offering artistic space for marginalized voices, a guest editor with Quail Bell Magazine, and she also co-hosts a podcast, Critiques for The Culture, where media is dissected through humor and a socio-political lens. You can find pieces of Taneasha’s in Prism, Well + Good, Rewire. News, Black Youth Project, them., and more
Layla Benitez-James (@laylabenitezjam) is a translator and editor based in Alicante whose essays have appeared in Tenderly Mag, EuropeNow Journal and Asymptote Journal. Poems are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review and Bennington Review, and translations and poems have appeared in Latino Book Review, Poetry London, The London Magazine, The Acentos Review, Hinchas de Poesia, Guernica, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her audio essays about translation can be found at Asymptote Journal Podcast. Her first chapbook, God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure was selected by Major Jackson for Cave Canem's 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and published by Jai-Alai Books in Miami.
Camille Colpitts is a Black-mixed Mama, southern-born, queer-fem writer who recently returned to the Southwestern Desert. She spent her teenage years in the Netherlands and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 13 years. Her writing focuses on living through trauma, navigating wellness, intersecting identities, motherhood, and love. At her MFA program at Goddard College, she is nearing completion on her memoir--a testimonial of love, written for her son after a cancer diagnosis. Writing from both non-fiction and poetry works can be found in The Electric Rail Literary Magazine, Mixed Mag, Variety Pack, and more. She loves laundromats, excessive napping, Andes mints, and seeing people in real life. Find her exclaiming things on IG & Twitter @ofwafflesandmen.