Emily Dezurick-Badran is a writer, artist, librarian, and roller derby player living in San Francisco. Her stories have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Tin House Online, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a novel.

Madeline Gobbo is a writer, illustrator, and producer. With reporter Jessica Placzek, she produced season three of SFMOMA’s art podcast Raw Material, Landfall. Her recent fiction appears in Black Candies: Gross and Unlikeable, Wolfman New Life Quarterly, and Cosmonauts Avenue. Her collaborative fiction with Miles Klee appears in Joyland, Territory, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Wigleaf. Find her at http://www.madelinegobbo.com/

Dino Foxx, born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, is a nationally presented actor, singer, dancer, writer, spoken word poet, hip-hop artist, arts educator and activist. He is a founding member of Tragic Bitches (a Queer Xicana/o Performance Poetry Collaborative), a company member with Jump-Start Performance Co. and an emcee with the band, The Push Pens. His poetry has been published in such collections as Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Floricanto Press), the 19th issue of Suspect Thoughts: A Journal of Subversive Writing (2007), and Queer Codex: Chile Love (Evelyn Street Press/allgo). Foxx will also be featured in the upcoming poetry collection Joto: An Anthology of Queer Xicano & Chicano Poetry through Kórima Press.

Isabella Esser-Munera teaches English to fourteen year olds in Brooklyn, NY and is an advocate of children everywhere. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, XRAY, and elsewhere. Find her at https://www.isessermunera.com/

M./Megan Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, winner of the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They have published work in many journals including Fence, LIT, and Black Warrior Review, and are the author of three chapbooks, most recently The Feels, an exploration of fan fiction and affect. Find them at http://meganmilks.com/

Roberto F. Santiago is the author of Angel Park (Lethe, 2015), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, and LIKE SUGAR (Nomadic, forthcoming). Recent work appears in Ninth Letter, Love Jets, and Apogee. Roberto lives in San Francisco and is an MSW candidate at UC Berkeley. 

Yujane Chen is a queer migrant poet from Taiwan. They are a Pink Door Fellow, Kundiman Fellow, & the curator of Dispatches From The Stars, a literary space for migrant artists of color. They are currently earning a B.A. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where they are a member of the 2018-2019 CalSLAM CUPSI Team.

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Tran is a Kundiman fiction fellow, a Lambda fiction fellow, and the recipient of the Jeanne Cordova scholarship for Lambda fellows in 2017. She holds a B.A. from Rollins College, an M.Ed. from the University of California, San Diego, and an MFA in fiction from San Diego State University. Her book reviews, fiction, poetry, and essays have most recently appeared in Brickroad, Vien Dong, Little Saigon, Tayo Literary Magazine, Diacritics, and Foglifter. She is a high school and middle school English teacher, and a mother of two magical little boys. She lives on the shores of southern California, spending most of her days near the ocean she can’t breathe without.

Damitri Martinez (he/his) is a 2019 Lambda Fellow and winner of the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Award for Emerging Writers. His work has appeared in Foglifter Journal. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado. Website: http://www.damitrimartinez.com

Nia KB [they/them] is a Black queer nonbinary poet, editor, and educator currently based in Austin, TX. They’ve received fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Texas Christian University, Lambda Literary, The Hurston/Wright Foundation, UTSA’s African American Literatures and Cultures Institute, and elsewhere. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Matador Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Shade Journal, and other pretty places. If you got this far, follow them on twitter, instagram, or facebook.

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Kanika Agrawal (she/her) is an Indian citizen and hybrid specimen raised in six countries on four continents. Currently, she lives with her toy fox terrier in Denver, CO. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, FOLDER, Notre Dame Review, SAND, and various SF&F publications. Selections from her manuscript Okazaki Fragments, which draws on a series of scientific papers on discontinuous DNA replication, were published in 2019 in Foglifter 4.1. More fragments will materialize in 2020 in a chapbook from Oversound. You can find out more at her website.

Serena Chopra (she/her) is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker, soundscape designer and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver, an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and was a Kundiman Fellow, a 2011-2013 Redline artist in Residence, a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar (Bangalore, India), and has received a month-long artist residency at Understudy Denver for September 2020. She has two books, This Human (Coconut Books 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two films, Dogana/Chapti (2018, winner of ArtHyve’s Archives as Muse Film grant, Official Selection at Frameline43, Oregon Documentary Film Festival, Seattle Queer Film Festival, Nahia Film Festival and Cinema Diverse) and Mother Ghosting (2018). Serena was recently a featured artist in Harper’s Bazaar (India) as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.” Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University. You can find out more at SerenaChopra.com

Milo Todd’s (he/him) fiction focuses on trans and queer history, with additional works on the trans experience and the trans body. His fiction has appeared in Foglifter, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter Press), and Emerge: The 2019 Lambda Fellows Anthology (Lambda Literary Press). His other works have appeared on Writer Unboxed, Dead Darlings, GrubWrites, and Everyday Feminism, among others. He was selected as a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction for his novel SNUFF and received a fellowship to attend the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. He is an alum of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator Program, where he received a Pechet Fellowship for his novel THE FALCON OF DOVES. Milo has presented regularly at the Boston Book Festival and The Muse & The Marketplace. He curates Writing Beyond Binaries, a panel series celebrating trans and nonbinary writers’ experiences in various stages of their careers. Milo currently teaches writing at GrubStreet and he consults on fiction manuscripts and transgender inclusion in the classroom.

I like walking up a mountain more than walking down; on the Enneagram, I’m a 1; I’m also a Capricorn; learning is infinitely more interesting to me than knowing (and scarier, too); along with my partner, I am wildly blessed to have two pit bulls who are willing to cuddle any time day or night; I am white; I was born and raised a girl in Hixson, TN as a speaking-in-tongues Pentecostal and I eventually came out as queer, feminist, anti-racist, and trans-masc; I wrestle-duet with these complicated and often contrasting social geographies every day; I never cease to experience a simultaneous horror and deep love any time I pay attention to the world. If you want to learn more about my writing, teaching, or collaborations, here’s my website.

Natasha Dennerstein (she/her) was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Natasha has had poetry published in many journals internationally. Her collections Anatomize (2015), Triptych Caliform (2016) and her novella-in-verse About a Girl (2017) were published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco. Her trans chapbook Seahorse (2017) was published by Nomadic Press in Oakland. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is an editor at Nomadic Press and works at St James Infirmary, a clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco. She was a 2018 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat.

N/A Oparah (she/her) is a queer, first-generation Nigerian-American writer. Her other work has appeared in Madwomen in the Attic, QXotc, Fictional International, ANMLY and other journals. N/A has received residencies in writing, art, and narrative media from Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain and Proyecto Lingüistico Quetzalteco in Xela, Guatemala. N/A holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and a B.S. in Neuroscience & Philosophy from Duke University. She is the Director of Community Programs at StoryCenter, a digital storytelling non-profit in Berkeley, CA. She is studying towards a PhD at Loughborough University in Creative Arts and Design in the UK. Her novella, Thick Skin, is forthcoming with KERNPUNKT Press (April 2021). More on her here.

Nefertiti Asanti (they/she) is a poet born and raised in the Bronx and a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Watering Hole, Lambda Literary, Anaphora Arts, Winter Tangerine, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Nefertiti’s work can be found at AfroPunk, Santa Clara Review, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Currently, Nefertiti serves as prose poetry editor for Stellium Literary Magazine. nefertitiasanti.com

Jody Chan (they/them) is a writer, drummer, organizer, and therapist based in Toronto. They are the author of haunt (Damaged Goods Press), all our futures (PANK), and sick, winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award. They can be found online at www.jodychan.com and offline in bookstores or dog parks.

K-Ming Chang (she/her) is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook BONE HOUSE was released by Bull City Press. Her short story collection, GODS OF WANT, is forthcoming from One World on July 10, 2022. 

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral student in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, the monumental misrememberings, is published with Co-Conspirator Press//The Feminist Center for Creative Work (2020). She was chosen as a finalist in the Creative Nonfiction Prize for Indiana Review in 2020, and is a creative fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. She was selected for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & writers in 2021. Her works can be found in Foglifter, Apogee Journal, Interim Poetics, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Dez Deshaies (he/him) is a writer, game designer, and youth advocate from Chicago. His writing has appeared in Foglifter, The Heartland Review, Menacing Hedge, and elsewhere. His multimedia/games work has been exhibited at the Orlando Museum of Art and the Adler Planetarium. Currently, he’s at work on a novel about boy bands. He is on Instagram and Twitter @dezdeshaies. 

Zak Salih (he/his) is the author of the novel Let’s Get Back to the Party, recommended by O, the Oprah Magazine; BuzzFeed; Cosmopolitan; The Millions; Electric Literature; Vanity Fair; the Advocate; Harper’s Bazaar; Kirkus Reviews; Lambda Literary; and other publications. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Foglifter, Epiphany, Crazyhorse, the Florida Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the Millions, Apogee Journal, Kenyon Review Online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, DC.

Mihee Kim (she/her) is a writer, visual artist, and cultural organizer. She works intuitively across disciplines and traditions, foraying between writing, multi-modal collage, painting, and craft forms. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and her manuscript Nomenclature was named a finalist for the Bergman Prize. Nomenclature is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press in the Fall of 2022. She earned a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA at California College of the Arts, where she was awarded the Leslie Scalapino Award. Mihee is also managing director of Kearny Street Workshop, a longstanding arts nonprofit for Asian Pacific Americans. She creates on Chochenyo Ohlone land, also known as beloved Oakland, California.

Tauheed Zaman (he/him) is a Bengali-American writer and physician who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His prose appears in Salon and Foglifter Press. His science writing has been published in several medical journals including the Journal of Addiction Medicine and Substance Abuse Journal. When not writing, you can find him kayaking the Pacific coast or singing with the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in thenewyorker.com, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes in 2017. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize. She is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Briana Grogan (she/they) is a Black queer femme from Southern California. Her poetry found form in San Francisco, where they currently live and work as a bookstore clerk. She received her MFA in Poetry from Mills College. Their writing explores the silence in grief and rejoice in healing. She was a 2021 finalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest.

Tahirah Alexander Green (they/them) is a literary artist based in Washington, DC. They are committed to crafting stories that nourish, heal, or disrupt. They’ve received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Tin House, Hurston/Wright and DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. You can read their work in Color Bloq, The Rumpus, Electric Literature and more. Connect with them at www.tahirahagreen.com. 

Sahil Mehta (he/him/His) was born and raised in India. He currently lives in Boston, MA. He recently gave up a 20+ year career in educational publishing to focus on writing and painting. When he’s not revising his novel or playing with acrylic and ink, he works in the hospitality world. His cocktail recipes have won numerous awards and appeared in local and national media. 

A.A. Vincent (they/them/she) is a poet and essayist. They are the author of Person, Perceived Girl (Barrow Street Press), which came out Fall 2022. Her work has appeared in Santa Clara Review, MumberMag, West Trestle Review, and most recently in Black Bird Press News and Review. They live in the Bay Area.

Daisuke Shen (they/them) is the author of the forthcoming short story collection Vague Predictions & Prophecies (CLASH Books 2024). Their collaborative novella Funeral with Vi Khi Nao was published by KERNPUNKT Press in January 2023.