Lauren Haldeman is the author of Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Center for Literary Publishing), Calenday (Rescue Press, 2014) and The Eccentricity is Zero (Digraph Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Tin House, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Fence and The Rumpus. A comic book artist and poet, she has been a recipient of the Colorado Prize for Poetry, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You can find her online at http://laurenhaldeman.com

Simone White's Dear Angel of Death was published by Ugly Duckling Presse this spring. She is also the author of Of Being Dispersed, House Envy of All the World and the chapbooks Unrest and Dolly (with Kim Thomas). She lives in Brooklyn, and joins the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania this summer.

Photo by Dianna Frid

Jen Bervin is an artist and poet whose research-driven interdisciplinary works weave together art, writing, science and life in a complex yet elegant way. She is a SETI Institute Artist in Residence, a program that facilitates a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas between artists and scientists. 

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center; BRIC, Brooklyn; and the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University, Providence; and featured in exhibitions at MASS MoCA; Getty Research Center, Los Angeles; Yale University, New Haven; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Power Plant, Toronto; and Artisterium, Tbilisi.

Bervin has published ten books, including Silk Poems—a long-form poem presented both as a book (Nightboat Books, 2017) and as an implantable biosensor made from liquefied silk developed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab. Silk Poems is a 2018 finalist for the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award from the nation’s oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing LGBTQ literature.

Bervin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Foundation for Contemporary Art (2017), The Rauschenberg Residency (2016), Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2016), LAP Fellowship, Montalvo Arts Center (2016), Bogliasco Fellowship, Liguria Study Center (2016), Fitt Artist in Residence, Literary Arts, Brown University (2015), and a Creative Capital Grant (2013).

Her work has been covered in media outlets such as Huffington Post, NPR, The Nation, LA Times, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and can be found in more than thirty international collections.

Bervin was recently a Winter 2018 Artist in Residence at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities hosted by the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Bervin taught a studio course titled “Advanced Materials” focused on the intersection of art and science through the exploration of traditional craft and technological innovation, offered through the Department of Art Theory and Practice in collaboration with the McCormick School of Engineering.

Read more about Jen Bervin at http://jenbervin.com/.

Kamden Hilliard was born in California and grew up in Hawai’i. They graduated from The University of Hawai’i at Mānoa with a BA in American Studies and are a Graduate Fellow at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Kamden has received support from Callaloo, Sarah Lawrence College, The UCROSS Foundation, and the Davidson Institute. Kamden prefers Kam and published three chapbooks: distress tolerance (Magic Helicopter Press, 2016), Perceived Distance From Impact (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), and hencefore: A Travel Poetic (forthcoming, Omnidawn). Find their writing in The Black Warrior Review, West Branch, American Chordata, Lambda Literary Review, and other sunspots. If they did something else, it, too, would be pro-human.

Megan Kaminski is the author of two books of poetry, Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012), and ten chapbooks, including most recently Providence (Belladonna*, 2016). She is an assistant professor in the University of Kansas' Graduate Creative Writing Program and an Integrated Arts Research Initiative Faculty Fellow at the Spencer Museum of Art. She also curates the Taproom Poetry Series in downtown Lawrence. Currently she is working on a book about indeterminacy, attraction, and botanical forms as models for human possibility. http://www.megankaminski.com/

H. Melt is a poet, artist, and educator whose work proudly celebrates Chicago’s queer and trans communities. Their writing has appeared many places including In These Times, The Offing, and Them, the first trans literary journal in the United States. They are the author of The Plural, The Blurring and editor of Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. Lambda Literary awarded them the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers in 2017. They’ve also been named to Newcity’s Lit 50 list, as well as Windy City Times’ 30 under 30. H. Melt co-leads Queeriosity at Young Chicago Authors and works at Women & Children First, Chicago’s feminist bookstore.

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize, and A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco Books, 2018). Her poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, POETRY, The Literary Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, The Home School in Miami, the Aspen Institute, New York University, the University of Chicago, and Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. In 2017, she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Chicago.

Read "Say Grace" in Poetry Magazine

Photo by Aaron Cedolia

Allyson Paty's poems can be found in Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, Tin House, the PEN Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and a participant in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's 2017-2018 Workspace program. With Norah Maki, she is co-founding editor of Singing Saw Press.

Sara Jane Stoner is a teacher, writer, and PhD candidate in English at CUNY Graduate Center. Her first book, Experience in the Medium of Destruction (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2015) was nominated for a Lambda Award in Poetry. A chapbook, GRIEF HOUR, was published in the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of Black Warrior Review.

Photo by Dia Felix

beyza ozer is a queer/trans/Muslim writer living in Chicago. beyza's work has appeared in & is forthcoming from The Offing, Pinwheel, Vinyl, Nightblock, Witchcraft Magazine, Shabby Doll House, & the anthology SUBJECT TO CHANGE: TRANS POETRY & CONVERSATION (Sibling Rivalry Press 2017). beyza is the author of FAIL BETTER (fog machine, 2017) & I DON'T MEAN TO REDSHIFT (Maudlin House, 2016). They are deputy director of social media at YesYes Books. beyza works at The Poetry Foundation.