Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Baruch Porras Hernandez has performed all over North America as a writer, storyteller, poet, and stand up comedian. He is the author of I Miss You, Delicate and Lovers of the Deep Fried Circle from Sibling Rivalry Press, and has received fellowships and grants from Banff Center for the Arts, Berkeley Rep, SF Arts Commission, Creative Work Fund, and the Lambda Literary Foundation. He is the host and creator for ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? A Latinx Literary Showcase, and is a regular host of literary shows for KQED. He is originally from Toluca, Mexico and now  lives in San Francisco.

Danny Thanh Nguyen’s short stories and personal essays have appeared in The Journal, South Dakota Review, Entropy, New Delta Review, Gulf Coast, and other magazines. He is editor of AS IS, an anthology of Vietnamese American art and literature, and has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman and Voices of Our Nation Foundation (VONA). Danny recently received an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission for his collection of essays about parallel survivalism between Southeast Asian American refugee communities and queer leather communities in the post-AIDS epidemic era.

Chad B. Anderson has published fiction in Salamander Review, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Best American Short Stories 2017, Clockhouse, and Burrow Press Review, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has been a resident at the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony and was the Winter 2018-2019 writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando. He is currently an acting managing editor for Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters and has served as guest editor for Burrow Press Review. Born and raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he earned his B.A. from University of Virginia and his M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University, where he served as fiction editor for Indiana Review. He currently lives in Michigan.

Kathryne David Gargano hails from the Pacific Northwest and attended Portland Community College. A poet and short story writer, she received her MFA from the University of Nevada–Las Vegas and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin­–Milwaukee.  She is the current Managing Editor for Cream City Review, and her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Colorado Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She currently lives in Milwaukee with her three-legged pup, Peternelle.

Grace MacNair is a poet, teacher, and healthcare professional. Born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina, she currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from Hunter College. She has received residencies and fellowships from Monson Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, Brooklyn Poets, and Hunter College. Grace was selected by Yona Harvey as the winner of Radar Poetry’s 2021 Coniston Prize and by Safia Elhillo as the winner of Palette Poetry’s 2022 Emerging Poet Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Radar Poetry, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere.

Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer and teaching artist based in Seattle, WA. She serves as Events Director for The Seventh Wave and Assistant Poetry Editor for Newfound and works in the University of Washington’s Office of Equity & Justice. Her poems, featured in Ninth Letter, TriQuarterly, Waxwing, Columbia Journal, Poetry Northwest, 128 Lit, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere, have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net anthologies. She is working on her first book, Anchor Baby.

Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press, 2020), which was selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches English and Environmental Studies at Washington and Lee University and lives in the mountains of Virginia where she, her partner, and their daughters homestead and grow food. Green’s chapbook, The Ones We Have, received the 2012 Flying Trout Chapbook prize. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Paris Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Shenandoah, and Pleiades and she is the recipient of the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award.

Monica Uszerowicz is a writer and photographer based in Miami. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Believer, BOMB, Burnaway, Cultured, Filmmaker Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Pin-Up, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She was a recipient of an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant in 2020 to support Groundwater, an essay series. Groundwater highlights artists from Florida or the Caribbean whose work addresses—or attempts to mitigate—environmental injustice and the effects of the climate crisis.

Kira Brooke Smith is a creative nonfiction writer and educator from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, currently living in Portland, Oregon. She holds a Master of Science in Geography from Portland State University and studied creative writing at Portland Community College. Her nonfiction works are informed by her background in environmental science and passion for transformative politics. Her writing has been featured in The Atticus Review, Cagibi, The Pointed Circle, Oregon Humanities, The Guardian Online, and elsewhere. Her essay “Tense” was included in the 2021 Plain China Anthology of the Best Undergraduate Writing.

Cristina Correa is a writer and educator from Chicago, where she served at-risk and marginalized communities for more than a decade. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Kenyon Review, CantoMundo, Hedgebrook Foundation, Whiting Foundation, Mae Fellowship, Hawthornden Literary Retreat, Palm Beach Poetry Fest, and Cornell University, among others. Her writing has been published, broadcast, and exhibited in venues including the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Best New Poets series, Missouri Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, NPR’s Latino USA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and elsewhere.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is a writer and educator with poems forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, The Nation, and Narrative Magazine, and a chapbook, House Work, from Ugly Duckling Presse. A MacDowell, Lambda Literary, and UCross Fellow, she also translates Korean poetry, teaches creative writing at UC San Diego, and edits for Guernica magazine.

Mai Tran is a genderqueer Vietnamese American writer based in New York. They were a winner of Epiphany Zine’s 2020 Breakout 8 Writers Prize and their work has appeared in Apogee, Vox, i-D, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. They served as a nonfiction coordinator for MFA App Review and were a Poetry Coalition Fellow with Lambda Literary.

Marcus Wicker is the author of Silencer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. He is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Tennessee Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poetry and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor of Southern Indiana Review, and an associate professor of English at the University of Memphis where he teaches in the MFA program.

Emily Skaja was born and raised in rural Illinois. Her first book, BRUTE, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets (Graywolf Press, 2019). She holds an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati, where she was a Taft Summer Research Fellow and also earned a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Emily is the Poetry Co-Editor of Southern Indiana Review. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, an AWP Intro Journals Award, an Academy of American Poets College Prize, and a 2019-2020 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta, PhD is a multi-award winning Aniyunwiya interdisciplinary poet and artist. As a native of the occupied land of what is often referred to today as “Oregon” and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, space, place, and de-colonization are the driving forces behind her work. She is currently undertaking her Fulbright Senior Scholar post in Bengaluru, India where she is curating a poetry anthology in the colonizer’s tongue. Jessica’s forthcoming books including [sp]RED, which Indigenizes the tarot deck (Red Planet Books 2024) and One of Kokum’s Kids (Lee & Low 2024).

Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky’s Poet Laureate, is the award-winning author of Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence, Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of a 2022 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, a 2021 O. Henry Prize, a 2020 USA Artists Fellowship, and a 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, is forthcoming from Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House in August 2023. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Associate Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.