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Ananda Lima is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books,2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize.  Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press), as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness,  and elsewhere.   She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers and has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program. Lima currently serves as a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, and The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.

 Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, a Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Literature, an Editorial Board Member for Beloit Poetry Journal, and an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press. She is the author of two chapbooks, her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, from Soft Skull Press, which won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award and the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and Resting Bitch Face, forthcoming in Fall of 2025. She is also a co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama from Texas Review Press, and of Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology on Black folklore from HarperCollins