Gracia "Cianga" Mwamba

Gracia "Cianga" Mwamba (she/they) is a Congolese artist based in California, by way of South Africa. She was a semifinalist for the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and NFSPS Board Award. She has also received fellowships from UC Berkeley's Arts and Research Center, Brooklyn Poets and a residency from Atlantic Center for the Arts. Gracia's intidisciplinary art practice is grounded in exploring black art as radical joy and critical protest.

While preparing her debut collection, her work can be found in Rappahannock Review, Berkeley Fiction Review and website (cianga.com). When not creating art, Gracia can be found streaming on Twitch, reading or consuming questionable amounts of chocolate.

RaJon Staunton

RaJon Staunton is a queer Black writer and editor from Beckley, West Virginia. Their poems have been published in print and online in Foglifter Journal, wildness, Teen Vogue, and Hobart, among other places. Currently, RaJon is pursuing their MA at Marshall University and is the Social Media Editor for UnCollected Press.

Ariana Benson

Ariana Benson was born in Norfolk, Virginia. She received the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the 2021 Porter House Review Poetry Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She is the 2022 Eliza Moore Fellow for Artistic Excellence at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. 

Jordan Honeyblue

Jordan Honeyblue is a writer from Baltimore, MD. She graduated from Morgan State University in 2018 and obtained her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky in 2021. Her writing and poetry manuscript on "Heartwork" explores what it means to be a (un)healthy Black girl and woman in America. She recently served as a 2021-2022 Antiracist Science Education Research Fellow for LabXchange, an online science learning platform created by Harvard University. Jordan has also received fellowships and/or participated in writing retreats from the following organizations and universities: The Furious Flower Poetry Center Fellowship for The Living Truth Legacy Seminar on the Life and Work of Nikki Giovanni (James Madison University, 2018); The Poets and Scholars Summer Writing Retreat through Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (Rutgers 2021); The Watering Hole (2021), and The Wild Seeds Writer's Retreat (CUNY 2022). In 2021, she was nominated for Best New Poets and Best of Net. Poetry by Jordan Honeyblue has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Orleans Review, The Common, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Inverted Syntax.