Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, fiction writer and translator. His books include several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008), and the cross-genre text Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 2009). He is a contributing editor for AWP Writers Chronicle and associate editor of the literary magazine FIELD and founding editor of the small press Nightboat Books. He is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College.

Ryka Aoki (she/her) is a poet, composer, teacher, and novelist whose books include He Mele a Hilo and two Lambda Award finalists, Seasonal Velocities and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. Ryka’s work has appeared or been recognized in publications including Vogue, Elle, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, and Buzzfeed. Her poetry was featured at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and she was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.”

Gina Apostol's last novel, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 Pen/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She is working on William McKinley's World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays, stories, and op-eds have been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, Grand Street, and Ploughshares. In 2001, he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He now teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Jaswinder Bolina is author of the poetry collections Phantom Camera, winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press, and Carrier Wave, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry. His recent poems are collected in the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). They have also appeared in numerous U.S. and international literary journals and in The Best American Poetry series. His essays have appeared on The Poetry Foundation, The Huffington Post, The State, The Writer, and in several anthologies including Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press 2011), Language: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2013), and in the forthcoming 14th edition of The Norton Reader. Bolina is a professor of poetry in the MFA Program at the University of Miami.

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won top prizes in the 1993, 1994 and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution and Slam. He has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, PBS’ “In The Life” and MTV’s “Free Your Mind” Spoken Word Tour. Regie is the recipient of the 10th annual Writers for Writers Award sponsored by Poets & Writers and has received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Multi-Disciplinary Performance.

Lan Samantha Chang is Program Director and May Brodbeck Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and two novels, Inheritance and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages and has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. She has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They are also a Kelsey Street Press collective member and an Airlie Press editor. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as the Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. www.chinginchen.com

Marilyn Chin is the author of Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (WW Norton, 2009), Dwarf Bamboo (Greenfield Review Press, 1987) and The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Milkweed Editions, 1994). Rhapsody in Plain Yellow was published by Norton in 2002. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, and residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Residency, the Djerassi Foundation, and others. Chin’s work is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of 1996. Her poetry was also featured in Bill Moyers’s PBS series The Language of Life. She codirects the MFA program at San Diego State University.

Staceyann Chin was the winner of the 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam; first runner-up in the 1999 Outright Poetry Slam, winner of the 1998 Lambda Poetry Slam; a finalist in the 1999 Nuyorican Grand Slam; winner of the 1998 and 2000 Slam This!; and winner of WORD: The First Slam for Television. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and featured on "60 Minutes." "Hands Afire," Staceyann's first one-woman show ran for ten weeks at the Bleecker Theater in the Summer of 2000. In 2002, Staceyann was nominated for the Rolex Mentor and Protege Art Initiative. She was also featured on the second and third seasons of the Peabody Award winning HBO series, Def Poetry Jam. She has since gone on to co-writing and performing as one of the original cast members of the ground-breaking and critically acclaimed, Tony Award winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), a chapbook, Petite Manifesto (Vagabond, 2014), and a pamphlet, Freely Frayed, ㅋ=q, Race=Nation (Wave Books, 2014). She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, and Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her most recent translation of Kim Hyesoon, a contemporary Korean woman poet, is Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016). Choi also translates for the International Women’s Network Against Militarism. She was born in Seoul and came to the U.S. via Hong Kong. She now lives and works in Seattle.

Bei Dao is the author of poems that were a major source of inspiration during the April Fifth Democracy Movement of 1976, a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square. His books of poetry include Unlock (2000); At the Sky’s Edge: Poems 1991-1996 (1996), for which David Hinton won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets; Landscape Over Zero (1995); Forms of Distance (1994); Old Snow (1991); and The August Sleepwalker (1990). His awards and honors include the Aragana Poetry Prize from the International Festival of Poetry in Casablanca, Morocco, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a candidate several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was elected an honorary member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl and collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. A new novel, Your Name in Chinese, is due out in 2016. His work has appeared in Harpers,The Atlantic Monthly,and The Paris Review, among others, and his short fiction has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1998  and Best American Short Stories 1995, 1996 and 2001. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its “Best of Young British Novelists.” Davies is a recipient of the Pen-Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The Welsh Girl was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC International Literary Award and short-listed for The British Book Awards; The Ugliest House in the World won the John Llewelyn Rhys and  PEN/Macmillan prizes; Equal Love, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, was also a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Asian American Literary Award. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon, Emory and Northwestern and is now on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet and author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts. Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Bread Loaf, CantoMundo, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.  A longtime editor, she helps edit poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the online zine Visible Binary. From 2023-2025 she is the Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University. 

Eugene Gloria earned his BA from San Francisco State University, his MA from Miami University of Ohio, and his MFA from the University of Oregon. He is the author of three books of poems -- My Favorite Warlord (Penguin, 2012), Hoodlum Birds (Penguin, 2006) and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (Penguin, 2000). His honors and awards include a National Poetry Series selection, an Asian American Literary Award, a Fulbright Research Grant, a San Francisco Art Commission grant, a Poetry Society of America award, a Pushcart Prize, and a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He was appointed the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University for the 2013 spring semester. He teaches creative writing and English literature at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

Kimiko Hahn has been attracted to disparate source material over her nine collections of poetry—whether Flaubert's sex-tour in The Unbearable Heart, an exhumation in The Artist's Daughter or classical Japanese forms in The Narrow Road to the Interior. Rarefied fields of science prompted her latest collections Toxic Flora and Brain Fever. An advocate of chapbooks, her latest is The Cryptic Chamber. Hahn is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation of the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. Her most recent award was a Guggenheim Fellowship and she is a distinguished professor at Queens College, City University of New York.

Lee Herrick is the Fresno Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and the author of two books, Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, anthologies, and college textbooks, including The Bloomsbury Review, ZYZZYVA, Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley, 2nd edition, One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, and Visions Across the Americas, 8th edition, among others. Born in Daejeon, South Korea and adopted at ten months, he lives in Fresno, California and teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.

Tung-Hui Hu is the author of three books of poems: The Book of Motion (2003), Mine (2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (2013). Described as a "contained surreal style that deftly shapes a philosophical argument" (Los Angeles Times), his writing has appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, Gastronomica and Martha Stewart Living Radio. Hu teaches poetry and film/media studies at the University of Michigan, where he is assistant professor of English.

Lawson Inada is third-generation Japanese American, born and raised in Fresno, California. He has taught at Southern Oregon State College since 1966. For both historical and aesthetic reasons, Lawson Inada is a significant figure in Asian American poetry and literature. He was one of the co-editors of the landmark anthology, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, and has participated in efforts to recover writing by earlier Japanese American authors such as Toshio Mori and John Okada. Inada’s collection Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971) was one of the first Asian American single-author volumes of poetry from a major New York publishing house. Inada won the American Book Award in 1994 for Legends from Camp and was named Oregon State Poet of the Year in 1991. He has received a number of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], the anthologies Letters to a Writer of Color and This Arab Is Queer, and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. She the author of the forthcoming memoir Sick (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014)—a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and more— and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove, 2007), the 2007 California Book Award winner in “First Fiction,” one of the Chicago Tribune’s “Fall’s Best,” and a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Bookforum, Slate, Salon, Spin, The Daily Beast, Elle,and many other publications around the world. She is currently Editor at Large at The Scofield and Contributing Editor at The Offing, and Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Myung Mi Kim’s books of poems include Commons (University of California Press), DURA (Sun & Moon), The Bounty (Chax Press), and Under Flag, winner of the Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award (Kelsey St. Press). Anthology appearances in Asian-American Literature: An Anthology, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and other collections. Honors include a residency at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and awards from The Fund for Poetry. She is Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo.

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (FSG, 2022), and the linked story collection, Half Gods (FSG, 2018), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program.

lê thi diem thúy is a writer and performance artist. Born in southern Vietnam and raised in southern California, she often explores in her work the role of the body as the site of memory. She is the author of the novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and the solo performance works Red Fiery Summer, the bodies between us, and Carte Postale.  She has been awarded residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and United States Artists.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee lives in Denver, Colorado. Her books include Underground National (Factory School Press, 2010), Solar Maximum (Futurepoem, 2015), No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise (Kore, 2017), and Aerial Concave Without Cloud (Nightboat, 2022). A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she's held international residencies in video art and poetry, and presented work at the Denver Art Museum, Artworks Center for Contemporary Art, Chicago’s city-wide performance arts festival IN>TIME, and the Asian Arts Initiative. Her essays on race, contemporary poetics, trauma, and the avant-garde have appeared with Cambridge University Press, Iowa University Press, The Poetry Foundation, Entropy Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her at silentbroadcast.com

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), and a chapbook, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe Press, 2002).  Her books have been honored by the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she chairs the English department at a faith-based college in southern California, where she is also a novice harpist.

Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2008). His earlier collections are Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001); Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and will be reissued by BOA Editions in 2012. Lee's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1988 he received the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. He is also featured in Katja Esson's documentary, Poetry of Resilience.

Giles Li is executive director of the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, as well as a nationally recognized performance poet. His writing has been taught in curricula across the country, including Pomona College and the El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn. His poetry has been published in several places, including ESPN.com, Solstice Magazine, and the Asian American Literary Review. He was one of three featured artists in the documentary film Art Beyond Borders, produced by the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard University, and also starred in the award-winning short comedy film The Humberville Poetry Slam. Giles is a recognized thought leader in Asian American communities nationwide. He holds a Master’s degree in Public Affairs from UMass-Boston and is an alumnus of the Institute for Nonprofit Practice. Giles has also served as adjunct faculty in the Asian American Studies program at UMass-Boston, and is a cross-sector leader who has served on several boards and committees, including the Task Force for Financial Literacy at the Office of the State Treasurer, the Advisory Board for the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement and the Associated Grant Makers Board of Directors.

Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness(W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the most recent Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry,Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Research Institute. Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and educated at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.

Tan Lin is the author of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01, Ambience is a Novel with a Logo, Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource), 7 Controlled Vocabularies, Obituary 2004, and The Joy of Cooking (2010) .  His work has appeared in numerous journals including Conjunctions, Artforum, Cabinet, New York Times Book Review, Art in America, and Purple. His video, theatrical and LCD work have been shown at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, Yale Art Museum, Sophienholm Museum (Copenhagen), Ontological Hysterical Theatre, and as part of the WhitneyMuseum of American Art’s Soundcheck Series.  Lin is the recipient of aGetty Distinguished Scholar Grant for 2004-2005 and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book-length study of the writings of Andy Warhol. He has taught at the University of Virginia and Cal Arts, and currently teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University. He has just completed a sampled novel, entitled Our Feelings Were Made by Hand.

Poet, novelist, and playwright R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the best-selling novel Rolling the R’s, the novel Leche, and three collections of poetry, Prime Time Apparitions, The Evolution of a Sigh, and Drive By Vigils. A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including two from the Fulbright Foundation, a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, he has published in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and the Philippines. His stage adaptation of Rolling the R’s premiered in Honolulu in 2008 to critical and commercial success. He has lectured and taught, as a distinguished visiting professor in Creative Writing, in universities in the U.S. and the Philippines. Linmark divides his time between Manila and Honolulu.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning (Knopf, 2020), which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She is the former editor in chief of Catapult books, and lives in New York. A Burning is her first book.

Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Taxidermist’s Cut, Cowherd’s Son, and Cutlish; a book of translation, I Even Regret Night; and his hybrid memoir, Antiman. He is winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, finalists for the 2017 and 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry. Mohabir has received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Rajiv is currently a professor at Emerson College.

Philip Metres has written ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon 2020), Sand Opera (Alice James 2015), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), and The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), among others. Awarded the Lannan Fellowship, three Arab American Book Awards, two NEAs, and the Adrienne Rich Award, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.

David Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Anchor-Random), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996, Anchor). Among his awards, Mura has received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, two NEA Literature Fellowships, two Bush Foundation Fellowships, four Loft-McKnight Awards, several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and a Discovery/The Nation Award.

Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of the novels: Valiant Gentlemen, Forgery, A Carnivore's Inquiry, and Slow Burn; and two collections of short stories: The Caprices, winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award, and Tales of the New World. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction. She wrote the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. Murray received her MA from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as fellowships from Radcliffe and the Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Brown Literary Award from the University of Pittsburgh. Currently, Murray is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst MFA/creative writing program.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Lucky Fish. With poet Ross Gay, she is the co-author of the chapbook, Lace & Pyrite. She is the poetry editor of Orion magazine and her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry, and Tin House. Awards for her writing include an NEA Fellowship in poetry and the Pushcart Prize. She is professor of English at The State University of New York at Fredonia. In 2016-17, Nezhukumatathil will be the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Young Scholar Award and the SUNY Chancellor's Medal of Scholarly and Creative Activities.

Bich Minh Nguyen is the author of three books, all with Viking Penguin. Short Girls, a novel, was an American Book Award winner in fiction and a Library Journal best book of the year. Stealing Buddha's Dinner, a memoir, received the PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center and was a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year. Stealing Buddha's Dinner has been featured as a common read selection within numerous communities and universities. Nguyen's work has also appeared in publications including The New York Times and the FOUND Magazine anthology. Her most recent novel is Pioneer Girl. She has also coedited three anthologies: 30/30: Thirty American Stories from the Last Thirty Years; Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: I & Eye; and The Contemporary American Short Story. Nguyen has taught fiction and creative nonfiction in the MFA Program at Purdue University and the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. She and her family live in the Bay Area. 

Sigrid Nunez has published six novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. Her most recent book is Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. Among the many journals to which she has contributed are TheNew York Times, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, The Threepenny Review, Tin House,and O: The Oprah Magazine. A Feather on the Breath of God was a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award. It also received the Association for Asian American Studies Award for best novel of the year. Mitz, a mock biography of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s pet monkey, won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Nunez received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1993. She was the 2000-2001 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. In 2003, she was elected as a Literature Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In spring 2005, she was the Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Nunez has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University, Princeton University and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Washington University, Baruch College, Vassar College, Boston University, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and of several other writers' conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books. His third book, Constellation Route, is forthcoming in January 2022. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Necessary Fiction, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Ishle Yi Park is a Korean American woman who has been published in The Best American Poetry of 2003. She has been twice featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and performed her poetry on the NAACP Image Awards. She has a CD entitled “Work is Love,” and a book called The Temperature of this Water.

Award winning poet Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of four chapbooks and four full-length books, including TRI/VIA (Erudite Fangs/PUB LUSH, 2003) co-authored with Veronica Corpuz; Beloved Integer (Bootstrap/PUB LUSH, 2007); She, A Blueprint (BlazeVOX, 2011) with art by Sue Hammond West; and Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (Fordham, 2012), awarded the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. Pierce has collaborated with artists, dancers, and filmmakers and has performed her work internationally, most recently in France and in Japan. With J’Lyn Chapman, she is the editor of Something on Paper, an online poetics journal: www.somethingonpaper.org. She teaches in and directs the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Currently, she lives in Colorado with the poet Chris Pusateri.

Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1991.  A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology.  His first collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published by Coffee House Press in 2011 to critical acclaim.  He has been a City Pages and Star Tribune Artist of the Year.  He was recently awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to work on his newest manuscript in 2015.  He is the Program Director of the Loft Literary Center.

Jon Pineda’s new novel Let’s No One Get Hurt was published in March 2018 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and received a “starred review” from Booklist.  His debut novel Apology won the 2013 Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and his memoir Sleep in Me was a 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and was named a “Best Books of 2010” by Library Journal.  He is also the author of three poetry collections: Little Anodynes, winner of the 2016 Library of Virginia Literary Award, The Translator’s Diary, winner of the 2007 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and Birthmark, winner of the 2003 Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition.  He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and is on faculty at the University of Mary Washington.

Srikanth Reddy is the author of two books of poetry –– Facts for Visitors, which received the 2005 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, and Voyager –– both published by the University of California Press.  His scholarly study of 20th Century American poetry, titled Changing Subjects,  was published by Oxford University Press in 2011.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, Reddy has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the NEA, and the Creative Capital Foundation.  He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Bushra Rehman is a writer and cultural activist. She co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, described by Vibe magazine as “13 Books Every Mujerista & Womanist Should Read.” Her novel, Corona, a dark comedy about being Muslim American was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of its favorite novels about NYC and her collection of poems, Marianna’s Beauty Salon was described by Joseph O. Legaspi as a “love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home—and surviving.” Rehman is creator of the community-based writing workshop Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction. Her new novel Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion was recently published by Flatiron Books in 2022.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and four books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye. A hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, nonfiction and fiction entitled Intimate was published by Tupelo. Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio. She is an Associate Professor at theUniversity of Utah.  

Lee Ann Roripaugh’s most recent volume of poetry, Dandarians, is forthcoming from Milkweed Press in 2014.  Her third volume of poetry, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, was released by Southern Illinois University Press in 2009. A second volume, Year of the Snake, also published by Southern Illinois University Press, was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004.  Her first book, Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin Books, 1999), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series, and was selected as a finalist for the 2000 Asian American Literary Awards.  The recipient of a 2003 Archibald Bush Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, she was also named the 2004 winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the 2001 winner of the Frederick Manfred Award for Best Creative Writing awarded by the Western Literature Association, and the 1995 winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize.  Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.  Roripaugh is currently a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review. 

Patrick Rosal is the author of Uprock Headspin Scramble And Dive (Persea Books), My American Kundiman, and Boneshepherds. His work has been published in many journals and anthologies including North American Review, Columbia, The Literary Review, and The Beacon Best 2001. He has been a featured reader at many venues in and out of NYC, from Boston to Daytona Beach, as well as in London and on the BBC radio’s “World Today.” 

Matthew Salesses was adopted from Korea. He is the author of the novel The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015), an Amazon Bestseller, Best Book of September, and Kindle First pick; an Adoptive Families Best Book of 2015; a Millions Most Anticipated of 2015; a Thought Catalog Essential Contemporary Book by an Asian American Writer; and a Best Book of the season at Buzzfeed, Refinery29, and Gawker, among others. Forthcoming are a new novel, The Murder of the Doppelgänger (Little A, 2018), and a collection of essays, Own Story (Little A, 2019). His previous books and chapbooks include I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms), Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity (Thought Catalog Books), and The Last Repatriate (Nouvella). In 2015, Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers.

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Arizona State University where she is inaugurating a Poetry for the People program.

Prageeta Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1972, shortly after her parents emigrated from India in 1969. She attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard for her undergraduate studies and received an MFA in poetry from Brown University in 1995 and an MA in media studies from The New School in 2002. She is the author of four poetry collections: Undergloom (2013); Infamous Landscapes (2007); The Opening Question (2004), winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize; and Bliss to Fill (2000). Her work has also appeared in Agni, Art Asia Pacific, Boston Review, Combo, Fence, Indiana Review, Women’s Review of Books and other periodicals. Sharma received a 2010 Howard Foundation Grant and has taught in the creative writing program at The New School in New York City and in the Individualized BA program at Goddard College in Vermont. Sharma is currently an associate professor and director of the creative writing program at the University of Montana in Missoula. 

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea, during 박 정 희 Park Chung-hee's military dictatorship, and grew up in the Chicago area. She is the editor of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of poetry collections Unbearable Splendor (winner of a Minnesota Book Award); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of an Asian American Literary Award), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson. She lives in Minneapolis.

Ira Sukrungruang was born in Chicago to Thai immigrants. He earned his BA in English from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and his MFA from The Ohio State University. He is the author of four nonfiction books This Jade World (2021), Buddha’s Dog & Other Meditations (2018), Southside Buddhist (2014) and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy (2010), the short story collection The Melting Season (2016), and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night (2013). With friend Donna Jarrell, he co-edited two anthologies that examines the fat experience through a literary lens—What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology (2003) and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology (2005). He is a former member of the Board of Trustees for the Association of Writers and Writing Program (AWP), and is currently on the Advisory Board of Machete, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press dedicated to publishing innovative nonfiction by authors who have been historically marginalized. Sukrungruang is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award for Southside Buddhist, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection, a literary nonprofit organization, and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. 

Arthur Sze published three books in 2014: his ninth book of poetry, Compass Rose (Copper Canyon), a collaboration with artist Susan York, The Unfolding Center (Radius Books), and a bilingual selected poems, Chinese/English, Pig’s Heaven Inn (Beijing: Intellectual Property Publishing House). His other books of poetry include The Ginkgo Light, Quipu, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, and Archipelago. He is also a translator and editor and has published The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press). His poems have been translated into ten languages, including Burmese, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Turkish. His honors include the 2013 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, an American Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, an Asian-American Literary Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, as well as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Sze lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lehua M. Taitano is a queer Chamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (familian Kuetu yan Kabesa) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century, a dynamic collective which investigates how Indigenous and Black art lives in the 21st century and envisions how it will flourish in the 25th century and beyond. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Taitano’s work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.

Lysley Tenorio is the author of Monstress, named a book of the year by The San Francisco Chronicle,and The Son of Good Fortune, winner of the New American Voices Award from the Institute for Immigration Research. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Manoa, and Zoetrope: All-Story, and have been adapted the for the stage in San Francisco and New York City. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Macdowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in the Philippines and raised in California, he is an Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Truong Tran is a poet and visual artist. His publications include, The Book of Perceptions (Kearny Street Workshop 1999, finalist in The Kiriyama Book Prize), Placing The Accents (Apogee Press 1999, finalist in the Western States Book Prize for Poetry), dust and conscience (Apogee Press 2000, awarded the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Prize), within the margin (Apogee Press 2004) and Four Letter Words (Apogee Press 2008). He is the recipient of three San Francisco Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Grants, An Arts Council of Silicon Valley Grant, a California Arts Council Grant, a Creative Work Fund Grant and a Fund For Poetry Grant. Truong lives and works in San Francisco and is currently the visiting Professor of Poetry at Mills College. Truong's collection Dust and Conscience was just published in Spanish. His artwork has been shown at Intersection for the Arts, Kearny Street Workshop, and the California Historical Society. In February of 2010, Truong had his first solo exhibition at The Mina Dresden Gallery in San Francisco. In 2011, Truong was a featured writer at The Poetry Festival International, in Rotterdam. In 2012 Truong, along with artist Peter max Lawrence, will have a two person show at SOMARTS Gallery entitled At War.

Vu Tran's first novel, Dragonfish, was a NY Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year. His short fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, and other publications. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, and has been a fellow at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is a criticism columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in English & Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he is also Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books, winner of PEN America Open Book Award and the Kinglsey Tufts Poetry Award); KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays  (Merve Verlag); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University.

Pimone Triplett has published three books of poems, Rumor (2009), The Price of Light (2005) and Ruining the Picture (1998). She is also coeditor of the essay anthology, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play (2008). Her work has appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry, and many other journals. Her poems have also been featured in several anthologies, includingContemporary Voices from the East (Norton), Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande), and Asian American Poets,the Next Generation (Univ. of Illinois). An Associate Professor at the University of Washington, she is current director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. She has also taught in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her mother is Thai and her father is Caucasian.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, Anime Wong:  Fictions of Performance, and Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press.  I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, theAmerican Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award.  She received a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship and is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016); Barter (Graywolf Press, 2003); and Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Magazine, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress and Stanford University, among other awards. A former attorney, she now teaches poetry at Princeton University.

C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent being The Halo and Torn (Four Way Books 2016, 2011), and a novel in stories The Affliction (Four Way Books 2018). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he is the 2017 recipient of the Hanes Award given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His poetry has appeared in many literary magazines and journals and has been included in several editions of The Best American Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

C Pam Zhang is the author of two bestselling novels, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a Booker Prize nominee, and the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, and the California Book Award. She has been a finalist for awards from PEN America, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Center for Fiction. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.