Shelley Wong is a poet and the author of As She Appears (2022), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Poetry Northwest, and anthologies, including We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word; Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry; and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. She has led creative writing workshops at University of San Francisco, the Ohio State University, and Kenyon College. Her honors include fellowships and support from MacDowell, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, and Montalvo Arts Center. She lives in San Francisco.

Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body, and a novel, The Archer. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Elizabeth George Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Council, and Vassar College, and is a 2024 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature. Shruti’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeny's, AFAR Magazine, and The Believer,and twice won the O. Henry Prize. Her introduction to Ursula K Le Guin’s masterpiece Always Coming Home appears in the novel’s 2023 reissue. She teaches writing with the collective The Dream Side.

image credit: Shawn Poynter