Monica Sok is a Khmer poet and the daughter of refugees. She is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her work has been recognized with a "Discovery" Prize from 92Y. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and others. Sok is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. She has taught poetry to Southeast Asian youths at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California.

natasha (tashi) tamate weiss is a storyweaver and energy worker of japanese and eastern euro-jewish lineages. their work with words, movement, music, and film bends genre/space/time, moving fluidly between the mundane and the mystical. this is portal work, that creates openings and builds bridges between where we are and the expansiveness of what is possible. natasha's work focuses on recovering ancestral cosmologies, healing from cultural assimilation, and reclaiming the fullness of our souls. more of their expressions and offerings can be found at natamawei.com .

Karthik Sethuraman is an Indian-American living in California. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, AAWW, Fugue, Fairy Tale Review, and HAD, among others. One work, Saramakavi, was performed at the Asian Art Museum where he was a KSW writing fellow. His chapbook, Prayer under eyelids, is available from Nomadic Press.

Maureen Boyd was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Oakland, California with her husband and teenage twins. She was a union organizer for over fifteen years, and taught college composition before that. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, and is in the process of revising her novel with the hopes of querying agents in January 2022.

Dena Rod is a queer, nonbinary Iranian American poet and essayist, currently residing on occupied Ohlone territory. Their debut poetry collection, Scattered Arils, is now out from Milk & Cake Press and sold out of its first print run in less than 2 weeks. They're currently the creative nonfiction editor at homology lit and on the Rumpus' Features team.

Zara Jamshed is a queer, trans, disabled Pakistani-American poet from New York City. They are the winner of the Oroboro Penrose Poetry Prize for LGBTQIA+ writers and have work published in Kiwi Collective Magazine and the Protest Through Poetry anthology. Zara is currently working on their first full-length poetry collection Neither Created Nor Destroyed where they explore the joy of “contradiction” in queer/trans Muslim identity, lessons from the laws of thermodynamics, and diasporic longing.