Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Brutal Imagination, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a thriving national network of black poets, as well as an institution offering regional workshops, readings, a first book prize, and the summer retreat. In January 2026, Cave Canem was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Read more about Eady here.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music, which was the winner of a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster. She received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Read more about Antigua here.

JeFF Stumpo’s prose poems describing his lucid dreams, as well as rendering the hopes and fears of people he cares about into dreamscapes, have appeared or are forthcoming in places such as Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Salt Hill Journal, DMQ Review, Subnivean, and Voicemail Poems. He’s author of five chapbooks of poetry (most through Seven Kitchens Press), a survivor of psychosis and PTSD, husband to a PhD chemist, and father to an amazing trans son. You can find his literary updates at www.JeFFStumpo.com.

Porsha Olayiwola is an individual world poetry slam champion and the author of the collection i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola served as the third poet laureate for the City of Boston. She is a 2020 Academy of American Poets poet laureate fellow. Olayiwola is the assistant professor of poetry at Emerson College. Her work can be found in or forthcoming from with Triquarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, Split this Rock, the NBA, the Academy of American Poets, Netflix, the Rumpus, Wilderness Press, the Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere. Read more about Olayiwola on her website.

Three-time Boston Music Award-winning Spoken Word artist Amanda Shea is a Black, queer creative at the intersection of poetry, music, social justice, and culture. WBUR lauds her EP, God, Again, as “bridging the gap between poetry and music,” seamlessly blending spoken word with genres such as hip-hop, rap, rock, opera, jazz, R&B, and contemporary sounds. With work featured in the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Boston Globe, TEDx, Netflix, Prime Video, BBC News, and GBH, Shea’s voice honors African and Puerto Rican oral traditions, while pushing the boundaries of what poetry can be. Read more about Shea here.

oshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including Animal Days, The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks, The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, Tomaž, and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. Read more about Beckman and his work here.

Colin Channer was born in Jamaica and educated there, and in New York. His most recent book is Console (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which was listed for the PEN/Voelcker Award in addition to being a Finalist for the New England Book Award and a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Poetry Review and other venues. The State Poet of Rhode Island, Colin has received honors from the Academy of American Poets, The Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, The Amy Clampitt Residency and Brown University, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Arts. You can find out more about Channer on his website.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry and prose, including, most recently, MEMORY, The Shining, and the forthcoming Mother. She is also the author of the prose book Animal and a forthcoming book about Sappho from Columbia University Press. She is the editor of Essays and a co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Boston Review, among other places. Her first novel, Katie, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial. Read some of Lasky's work here.