José Olivarez is the co-author of the book of poems Home Court, and co-host of the poetry podcast The Poetry Gods. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the Program Director at Urban Word NYC. A winner of a 2016 Poets House Emerging Poet Fellowship and a 2015 Bronx Recognizes Its Own award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, his work has been published in The BreakBeat Poets, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Specter Magazine, and Union Station Magazine, among other places. He is from Calumet City, IL, and lives in the Bronx. You can purchase Home Court here and follow him on social media at @jayohessee.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He is a Cave Canem fellow, finalist for the 2015 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and semi-finalist for the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, The Journal, New England Review, Pleiades, River Styx, Spillway, TriQuarterly and elsewhere.

zakia henderson-brown is of starshine and clay lineage. She is a 2016 Poets House Emerging Poets fellow and has received additional fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Callaloo Journal, and the Cave Canem Foundation. Her poems have appeared in African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, No, Dear, North American Review, The Offing, Vinyl, and others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013 and has completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. zakia currently serves as Associate Editor and Outreach Coordinator at nonprofit publisher The New Press and on the board of the Brooklyn Movement Center. She lives in her native Brooklyn with furball Onyx.