Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond has written for AOL, Parenting Magazine, the Village Voice, Metro, and Trace Magazine. Her short story “Bush Girl” was published in the May 2008 issues of African Writing and her poem, “The Whinings of a Seven Sister Cum Laude Graduate Working Board as an Assistant,” was published in 2006’s Growing up Girl Anthology. A cum laude graduate of Vassar College, she attended secondary school in Ghana, Powder Necklace is loosely based on that experience. She is the author of the children's story: Blue: A HISTORY OF THE COLOR AS DEEP AS THE SEA AND AS WIDE AS THE SKY.

Stephanie Fetta holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. Her monograph Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) uncovers a new analytical lens Dr. Fetta identifies as the soma, loosely defined as the gestural body. Portrayer of our momentary and deeper subjectivities, the soma is also a central actor in social relations and a primary communicator of our ideological investments. Professor Fetta argues the soma is a pivotal site for unraveling bodily social technologies we use to create and sustain social subjugation. Specifically, she argues our somas efficaciously shame one another into intersectionally racialized stratifications.  In a hemispheric study, Professor Fetta's current research considers possible forms of latinidad south, north, and within the US border. She studies Mexican indigenous poetry of the Oaxaca diaspora in Southern California in relation to and against articulations of US latinidad. North of the US border, Dr. Fetta considers connections and dissonances between Canadian creative expression and US Latin@/x literature. She argues the promise and the limitations of an emerging sense of continental latinidad.  Professor Fetta is the editor of The Chicana/Latina Literary Prize: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, and is considered the foremost authority on the work the influential Chicano poet Andrés Montoya, winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award. She will co-edit a 2020 special edition of the Notre Dame Review on Montoya's legacy. Dr. Fetta has published with Routledge Press, Chicana/Latina Studies journal, and Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, among others.  PUBLICATIONS  Shaming into Brown: Somatic Analysis and Latina/o Literature. The Ohio State University Press. Monograph. October 2018.  "Dying Softly to His Song: Poetics of Love and Dissolution in Andrés Montoya's A Jury of Trees." Critical Introduction. Jury of Trees: Posthumous Poetry Collection of Andrés Montoya. Editor Daniel Chacón. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review Press, Arizona State University, 2017. 19-29. Invited introduction.  Co-editor of Notre Dame Review. Special Section on the Legacy of Andrés Montoya. Spring 2020.  "A Bad Attitude and A Bad Stomach: The Soma in Oscar ‘Zeta’ Acosta’s The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production in the Luso-Hispanic World 6:1 (2016): 88-109. Peer-reviewed article.  “Teaching the Work of Andrés Montoya” in Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Teaching. Routledge Press, 2015. Pp. 287-90. Invited contributor. Book chapter.  “Disability, Domestic Workers and Disappearance in Octavio Solís’s Lydia.” Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Spring Issue 4:2 (2015): 26-57. Peer-reviewed article. Nominated for Best Essay of 2015 by Latino Studies Forum, Latin American Studies Association.  Review of Transnational Borderlands in Women’s Global Networks: The Making of Cultural Resistance. Editors Clara Román-Odio and Marta Sierra. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 66: 4 (2012): 224-225. Invited review.  “How Does an Other Write anOther? The Filipino in Alfredo Véa’s The Silver Cloud Café" in One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the Oriental in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula. Editor Ignacio López-Calvo. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 282-296. Book chapter.  The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2008. Invited editor and author of introduction. Book.

Mark Matousek is an award-winning author of seven books, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story, The Boy He Left Behind, When You’re Falling, Dive, Ethical Wisdom: The Search for a Moral Life, Ethical Wisdom for Friends, Mother of the Unseen World, and Writing To Awaken: A Journey of Truth, Transformation, and Self-Discovery. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, including The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, Details, Tricycle, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar. He blogs regularly for Psychology Today and offers courses in creativity and spiritual growth around the world using the Writing To Awaken method.

John Fox, Practioner of Poetic Medicine (PPM), is a poet and author of Finding What You Didn't Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity through Poem-Making and Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making. He teaches regularly at the collegiate and post-graduate level as an adjunct faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies, Sofia University (formerly The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and Holy Names University, Oakland. He taught for 20 years as an adjunct at John F. Kennedy University-first through the Graduate School of Professional Psychology and then since 1997 in the Arts & Consciousness Department.

His latest novel, How to Mars, is available now. And his next poetry collection, What’s Left to Us by Evening, due out October 6th, is available for pre-order.

Danielle Legros Georges is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University. She is also the former Poet Laureate of the City of Boston, where she was tasked with raising the status of poetry in the everyday consciousness of Bostonians, acting as an advocate for poetry, language and the arts, and creating a unique artistic legacy through public readings and civic events.

Books

Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert, a book of English translations from the French (Subpress Collective, 2021)

City of Notions:  An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems, editor (Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, City of Boston, 2017)

Letters from Congo, a chapbook of poems (Central Square Press, 2017)

The Dear Remote Nearness of You, a book of poems (Barrow Street Press, 2016)

Maroon, a book of poems (Curbstone Press, an imprint of Northwestern University Press, 2001)

Médar Serrata (Santo Domingo, 1964) Poeta y ensayista residente en Estados Unidos. Doctor en Literatura Hispánica de la Universidad de Texas en Austin. Profesor de literatura en Grand Valley State University, Michigan, y autor de los poemarios Las piedras del ábaco (Colección Egro de Poesía,1986) y Rapsodia para tontos (LibrUsa 1999). Sus textos han sido recogidos en diversas antologías; su libro La poética del trujillismo: Épica y romance en el discurso de “La Era” (Isla Negra Editores, 2016) recibió el Premio Anual de Ensayo Pedro Henríquez Ureña.

Carlos Ulises Decena is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose work straddles the humanities and social sciences and whose intellectual projects blur the boundaries among critical ethnic, queer and feminist studies, social justice and public health. His areas of interest include critical theory as well as social and cultural analysis, with a particular emphasis on transnationalism and diaspora in the American continent, US Latinoamerica and the Caribbean. His first book, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. He is currently at work on Circuits of the Sacred, a project that articulates Latin@, queer, and Afro-diasporic theologies in the service of a non-denominational, sex and body-affirmative notion of the divine for queers of color.

Sandra pivoted from 19+ years as an English and Creative Writing professor to start her business in January 2022, Wild Women Leaders of Color (WWLoC). She is a life coach helping professional women release stress caused by workplace racism and patriarchalism, and centering them in their ancestors’ stories so they can step into their powerful place in the world. She also created The Stealth Auntie Network, part of WWLoC, to pair professional women with young women who are about to enter the workplace so they are supported in this transition and can access professional development and promotion opportunities.

You can reach Sandra at: www.wildwomenleadersofcolor.com

STARTING AUGUST 15: JOURNEY TO JOY is a 4-month program helping women somatically release stress, claim their story, and move towards changing their careers or starting a new business: https://calendly.com/talk-with-sandra/journey-to-joy

AUGUST 11 5pm PT, 8pm ET: FREE masterclass, HEAL YOURSELF TO HEAL OTHERS, is an introduction to JOURNEY TO JOY and describes how to release stress, develop story, and step into claiming your life’s true destiny. Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/free-masterclass-heal-yourself-to-heal-others-tickets-393264202817 

Reggie Marra is the author of Healing America's Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow (October 2022), and most recently, of Enough with the Talking Points (nonfiction, 2020), Killing America(poetry, 2018), and And Now, Still (poetry, 2016). His first work of nonfiction, The Quality of Effort, was published in 1991 and released in a second edition in 2013. Reggie is a co-founder, along with Kent Frazier, of Fully Human at Work—a 21st-Century Imperative. In addition to writing, he delivers his gifts to the world as a professional coach, a teaching poet, and a workshop facilitator. In the distant past, Reggie spent twenty-one years as a classroom teacher, administrator, and basketball coach in secondary and higher education.

Find out more at:

https://reggiemarra.com/

https://fullyhumanatwork.com/