Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream (Salmon Poetry, 2022). She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times and other places. She is a co-founder and current Executive Director of Zoeglossia, a non-profit to build community for poets with disabilities. She is also proud to serve as Associate Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Naomi Ortiz is a poet, writer, and visual artist whose intersectional work focuses on self-care for activists, climate action, disability justice, and relationship with place. They are a highly acclaimed speaker and facilitator with a leadership style emphasizing inclusion and spiritual growth. Ortiz is the author of Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press) and Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice (punctum books). Ortiz received the Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and USA Artists.

Photo credit: Jade Beall

Travis Chi Wing Lau is a poet who writes often about embodiment at the intersections of queerness and disability. His most recent chapbook, Paring, is available through Finishing Line Press. He is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His scholarly work is primarily focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture with research and teaching interests in literature and science, the history of medicine, and Disability Studies. Travis has contributed to numerous publications dedicated to accessible public scholarship like Synapsis, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. He also regularly reviews collections of poetry for literary and arts journals like Up the Staircase Quarterly and Tupelo Quarterly. He has B.A. in English with a minor in Classical Civilization from the University of California, Los Angeles (2012). He received both his M.A. (2013) and Ph.D. (2018) in English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (he/him) has had work published in The New York Times, Boston Review, WUSSY, The Wanderer, Vice, Rewire News, The Root, and Nat. Brut among other publications. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University with support from Davis Putter Scholarship Fund. SLINGSHOT, his first collection of poetry, won a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry; development of this work was supported by Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund, Culture/Strike Climate Change and Environmental Justice Fellowship, and the Rewire News Disabled Writers Fellowship. He is a recipient of a 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, and is the inaugural Brooklyn Public Library Poet-In-Residence. Find him on Twitter and Instagram at @cyreejarelle.

John Lee Clark is a DeafBlind poet, essayist, historian, translator, and an actor in the most thrilling development in DeafBlind history, the Protactile movement. He is a 2021-2023 Bush Leadership Fellow, a core member of Protactile Language Interpreting National Education Center, and a research consultant with the Reciprocity Lab at the University of Chicago.

He is a recipient of a Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and USA Artists, and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for his essay “Tactile Art” as well as the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine. His book of poems How to Communicate, long listed for the National Book Award, and Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays, were both published by W.W. Norton.

Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle’s 2015 Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Day’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2020, The New York Times, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, among other journals. Day holds a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, an M.F.A. from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on Disability Poetics from the University of Utah. Day was also the 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Day has also received awards and fellowships from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Amy Clampitt Fund, Lambda Literary Foundation, Hedgebrook, Squaw Valley Writers, the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities, and the International Queer Arts Festival. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.

Day holds a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, an M.F.A. from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on Disability Poetics from the University of Utah where Day was a Steffensen-Cannon Fellow, a United States Point Foundation Scholar, and Poetry Editor for Quarterly West.

Kay Ulanday Barrett aka @Brownroundboi is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020), received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have received residencies from Tin House as a 2022 Next Book Winner as well as as a 2020 James Baldwin Fellow at MacDowell, and most recently in 2023, residencies at Baldwin for the Arts and Millay Arts awarded by Lambda Literary.  Barrett is a three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia University, Northwestern, The School of the Art Institute, and more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, them., Colorlines, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, to name a few.  Find Barrett on social media @Brownroundboi.

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Her work is published in POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is a 2021 NEA Literature Fellow. Their debut collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound  (Milkweed Editions, 2020), was the winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Lamar Wilson’s cross-genre work centers the voices and experiences of black, brown, and indigenous folk thriving in the rural South despite white nationalist terror. He is the author of Sacrilegion—the 2012 selection for the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, an Independent Publishers Group bronze medalist, and a Thom Gunn Award finalist—and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), with Darrel Alejandro Hoynes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, and Phillip B. Williams. Wilson is on the faculty at Florida State University, and has received fellowships from, among others, the Cave Canem, Ragdale, and Hurston-Wright foundations. He holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.