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.

Kathryn Maris is a poet, critic and occasional curator who has published three books of poetry and a chapbook. Her poems have appeared in Penguin Modern Poets 5, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Best British Poetry; her prose has been featured in the TLS, The New Statesman and other periodicals. A section of Kathryn’s most recent collection, The House With Only An Attic And A Basement (Penguin UK 2018), won the Ivan Juritz Prize for creative experiment. A Royal Literary Fund Fellow from 2020-2023, she now teaches creative writing at City and Guilds of London Art School and edits the poetry for Mixed Feelings, a literary magazine associated with the dating app Feeld. Based in London, she is originally from New York, and spends much of her time there. 

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.

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His ninth book of poems,Irreverent Litanies,was published by Regal House. His previous collections include Talking with the Radio (Kattywompus Press) and The Number Before Infinity (Scarlet Tanager Books). His most recent play, Colette Uncensored, had its first staged reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and ran in London, Catalonia, San Francisco, and Portland. His translations of French literature include two books by Colette, Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems, and the novel Green Wheat; as well as works by André Breton, George Sand, and Marcel Pagnol. Rogow’s blog, Advice for Writers, features more than 250 posts. He has received the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award in Translation, and the Celestine Award for Poetry. He serves as poetry editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.

Dr. Herman Beavers is the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1989. He teaches courses in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature and Poetry Writing. He is the author of two scholarly monographs, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James A. McPherson (1995) and Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2018). His poems have appeared in numerous journals including, The Langston Hughes Colloquy, The American Arts Quarterly, The Painted Bride Quarterly, and Black American Literature Forum, among others. His  work is anthologized in Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty- First Century, Who Speaks for America, Show Us Your Papers, and Gathering Darkness: A Cave Canem Reader. He is the author of three chapbooks, A Neighborhood of Feeling, Obsidian Blues, and The Vernell Poems. He is completing a full-length volume of poems, Even in Such Light.