Arlene Keizer is a scholar, literary critic, and poet who writes about the literature, lived experience, theory, and visual art of the African Diaspora. Her poetry collection Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black—a cycle of poems about the African American artist Beauford Delaney—won the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published in the Wick Poetry Series in 2023. Among her other publications are the monograph Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery, contributions to scholarly volumes, and articles and poems in a range of venues including American Literature, PMLA, Poem-a-Day, African American Review, Radical Teacher, and TriQuarterly. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the Pembroke Center at Brown, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The daughter of emigrants from Trinidad, she has made Brooklyn, NY her home. She is a professor at Pratt Institute.

Taiye Selasi is an American writer and photographer of Nigerian and Ghanian origin, she describes herself as a “local” of Accra, Berlin, New York and Rome. In 2005, Selasi published “Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)“, her seminal text on Afropolitans. Her novel, Ghana Must Go, was published by Penguin in 2013. Selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, the novel has been sold in 22 countries. Selasi graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a BA degree in American Studies from yale, and earned her MPhil in international relations from Nuffield College, Oxford. She is the author of the children’s book Anansi and the Golden Pot, published in 2022.

Martha Baillie lives and works in Toronto. Her memoir, There Is No Blue, was on the CBC list of Best Non-Fiction Books of 2023, the Globe and Mail list of Best Books for 2023, and is forthcoming with Granta Books (UK) January, 2024. Her novel The Incident Report  (nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize) will be released as a feature film in June 2024, directed by Naomi Jaye, and starring Britt Lower and Tom Mercier, with Charlie Kauffman as executive producer. Her novel, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel was an Oprah editors’ pick. Her book Sister Language, co-written with her late sister, Christina Baillie, was a 2020 Trillium Award finalist. Her multimedia project based on The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is archived at www.schlogel.ca. Her work has been published in France by Actes Sud. Martha Baillie is a fellow in partnership with the DRG Foundation supporting the Franco-Canadian cultural exchanges. 

© photo Jonno Lightstone.

CJ Hauser is a multi-genre, non-binary, queer amphibian of a person who splits time between rural Central New York and Brooklyn. Their memoir, The Crane Wife is published by Doubleday in the US and Viking in the UK. The paperback is coming in July 2023. They are also the author of two novels: Family of Origin (Doubleday 2019) and The From-Aways (William Morrow 2014). Some places their work has appeared include: Tin House, Narrative Magazine, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, The Kenyon Review, The Guardian, Bon Appetit, Elle Magazine UK, Vogue UK, and The New York Times.

Luuk Gruwez was born in Courtrai (Belgium). His early poetry, in particular, attempted to compensate for permanent absence and loss by creating a cult of beauty. Linguistic subtlety and stylistic refinement were meant to offer an alternative to an inhospitable, unbearable world. Later, from Dikke mensen (Fat People) (1990) on, he evolved towards a more conciliatory attitude towards reality, drawing compelling portraits of individuals, who had in some way or another been neglected or forgotten. In pursuing these themes, he continued to be an interpreter of existential failure. This was also the case in Vuile manieren (Dirty Manners)(1994), a book of poetry that contained among others a cycle of poems on cancer. Gruwez has also been publishing more or less autobiographic prose. The most important titles are Het land van de wangen (The Land of the Cheeks) and Het land van de handen (The Land of the Hands). November Luuk Gruwez is a Fellow in partnership with Passa Porta International Literature House.