Nancy Agabian is a writer, teacher, and literary organizer, working in the spaces between race, ethnicity, cultural identity, feminism and queer identity. She is the author of Princess Freak, a poetry and performance text collection, and Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, a memoir. Her novel manuscript “The Fear of Large and Small Nations” was recently a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged fiction. She is the founder of Heightening Stories, a series of socially-engaged writing workshops and editing/coaching services offered online and in Jackson Heights, Queens. More information can be found at nancyagabian.com
Christopher Janigian is from Rhode Island. His work appears in the PEN Poetry Series, Prelude, Poor Claudia, and Web Conjunctions. He is an MFA candidate at Columbia University, where he is the poetry editor of issue #55 of Columbia Journal.
Nicole Haroutunian is the author of the short story collection Speed Dreaming. She is coeditor of the digital journal Underwater New York and cofounder of the reading series Halfway There. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Woodside, Queens.
Writer, musician, and award-winning educator Alan Semerdjian’s poems and essays have appeared in dozens of print and online publications and anthologies including Adbusters, Diagram, and Brooklyn Rail. He released a chapbook of poems called An Improvised Device (Lock n Load Press) in 2005 and his first full-length book In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books) in 2009. His songs have appeared in television and film and charted on CMJ. He earned his MFA at Goddard College in 2002 and currently teaches English at Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, NY. Alan resides in New York City’s East Village.
Alina Gregorian is a poet, artist, and curator. She is the author of the chapbooks Flags for Adjectives (Diez) and Navigational Clouds (Monk Books). One of her recent projects includes making a GIF for each letter of the Armenian alphabet. She curates Triptych Readings, hosts a video poetry series on the Huffington Post, and once conducted a workshop for the Poetry Society of America at the New York Botanical Gardens. From 2011-2016, she taught writing at Rutgers University. Find her online here: alinagregorian.com.