CHELSEA KRIEG is the author of Everything Is Water, winner of the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series (Virginia). Her work may be found in Fairy Tale Review, Writing the Land: Virginia Anthology, Terrain.org, Gulf Coast, New South, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. IX: Virginia, and elsewhere. She was runner-up in Hub City’s New Southern Voices 2023 Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New South 2021 Poetry Prize. Her website is www.chelseakrieg.com

MEG DAY is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award and finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day was also named the 2024 Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence and the 2025 SouthArts State Fellow in Literary Arts for North Carolina. The co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019), Day has received scholarly support for work in Deaf & disability studies from the Mellon Foundation, NC Humanities, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Recent work can be found in Best American Poetry & The New York Times. Day is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. www.megday.com

DIAMOND FORDE is the author of two poetry collections, The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin award, and Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) a 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery award finalist. Forde has received a Doctorate in Creative Writing from Florida State University, with a concentration in African American Poetics and Fat Studies, an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama, and a Bachelors in English at the University of West Georgia. Her work has received recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, in Great River Review’s Pink Poetry Prize, and has earned her a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship. You can find Forde’s work in Poetry Magazine, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Obsidian, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the Interviews Editor with Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, and as an avid lover of fish and grits. Find out more at her website: www.diamondforde.com 

BELLE BOGGS is the author of The Gulf: A Novel; The Art of Waiting; and Mattaponi Queen: Stories. She is coauthor, with Sylvester Allen, Jr. of The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw: From Reconstruction through Black Lives Matter. The Gulf was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and longlisted for the Crook’s Corner prize. The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Atlantic, Orion, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Ecotone, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Boggs has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Humanities Center, and is currently at work on a book about the history of the American school bus. She served for six years as the director of the MFA program and is a University Faculty Scholar.

CARTER SICKELS is the author of the novels The Prettiest Star (2020) and The Evening Hour (2012). His writing has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and Guernica. He is the 2025 recipient of Lambda Literary’s Duggins Prize for Outstanding Mid-Career LGBTQ Novelists and was a finalist for the John Dos Passos Prize in Literature. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

LATANYA MCQUEEN is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is the author of two books—the essay collection And It Begins Like This (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and the novel When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial, 2021; Olive Editions 2024, a Goodreads Choice nominee and Bram Stoker Award finalist. Her website is www.latanyamcqueen.com.