KAZIM ALI

Kazim Ali co-founded Nightboat Books with Jennifer Chapis in 2004 and served as its publisher from 2004–2007. He continues to edit books for Nightboat and serve as President of the Board of Directors. Kazim is a Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and chaired the Department of Literature there from 2021-2024. Prior to joining UCSD, Kazim taught at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary’s College of California, and Naropa University.

From his tenure at Nightboat Books, Kazim has experience recruiting and onboarding nonprofit board members, as well as program development and individual donor fundraising.

Kazim is the author of 16 books of poetry, fiction, essay and cross-genre work, as well as translator of works from French, Farsi, and Spanish.

andy chen

Andy Chen (Secretary) is a Taiwanese American poet and educator. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation, he holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He is a Kundiman Fellow and attended the 2014, 2016, and 2022 Retreats as a Fellow before returning to the 2023 and 2024 Retreats as an alumni staff member. His poems appear in Ploughshares, New England Review, The Offing, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere, and his reviews appear in Hong Kong Review of Books, Hyphen, and Colorado Review. He lives in St. Louis and teaches at John Burroughs School, where he serves as Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, and Engagement and serves on the Diversity and Education Committee of the Board of Trustees. He was born and raised in New Jersey. To read more, visit heyandychen.com.

ching-in chen

Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen (Treasurer) is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Massage Parlor Outreach Project core member, Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle's Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC and Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They currrently teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.

DAVID MURA

David Mura is a memoirist, essayist, poet, fiction writer, and playwright. He has taught at colleges and universities around the country. His most recent books are The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives and A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing.

David served as Director of Training for The Innocent Classroom, a program designed by writer and educator Alexs Pate to train K-12 teachers to improve their relationships with students of color. In 2024, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for general nonfiction. David previously served on the board of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), which is the only multi-genre workshop for writers of color. He has experience supporting arts organizations through change management.

A Sansei or third-generation Japanese American, David has written two memoirs, including Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, and multiple award-winning books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

rANA TAHIR

Rana Tahir (President) is a poet and author. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a member of RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers). In addition to her Choose Your Own Adventure novels, her work can be found in BAHR Magazine, Quarterly West, and Salt Hill Journal among others. She received her MFA from Pacific University and lives in Portland, OR. www.rana-tahir.com

seema yasmin

Seema Yasmin is a queer, Gujarati Muslim comedian, Emmy award-winning journalist, medical doctor, and author. She is clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative where she teaches health storytelling and studies the spread of disease disinformation. Seema is the author of eight books including Muslim Women Are Everything (HarperCollins), If God Is A Virus (Haymarket), and Djinnology: An Illustrated Compendium of Spirits and Stories From the Muslim World (Chronicle). She is the author of the forthcoming middle grade series, Muslim Mavericks; the children's book, Inshallah; and the novel The Voices, all from Simon and Schuster. She is a Kundiman Fellow. Seema studied medicine at the University of Cambridge. She lives in Las Vegas.

timothy yu

Timothy Yu is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of Diasporic Poetics, Race and the Avant-Garde, and 100 Chinese Silences. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Fence, and The New Republic.