"like (Write it!)"

Jenn Givhan is a Mexican-American and indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert, who grew up in the Imperial Valley, a small, border community in the Southern California desert. Her family has ancestral ties to the indigenous peoples of New Mexico and Texas, including Ysleta del Sur and the Tigua Indian peoples of the Ysleta region of El Paso. She’s the author of Rosa’s Einstein (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Girl with Death Mask (Indiana University Press, 2017), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Series, University of Arkansas Press), and Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize). Her chapbooks include Lifeline (Glass Poetry Press), The Daughter’s Curse, and Lieserl Contemplates Resurrection. She is also the author of the novels Jubilee (2020) and Trinity Sight (2019), both from Blackstone Publishing. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, the Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, a 2020 Southwest Book Award, an Honorable Mention for 2021 The Rudolfo Anaya Best Latino Focused Fiction Book Award category from the International Latino Book Awards Foundation, The 2019 New Ohio Review Poetry Prize chosen by Tyehimba Jess, Cutthroat Journal’s 2018 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize chosen by Patricia Spears Jones, The 2017 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize chosen by Monica Youn, The 2015 Lascaux Review Editors’ Choice Poetry Prize, and The Pinch Poetry Prize chosen by Ada Limón. Givhan's work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, AGNI, Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, and The Kenyon Review. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and her Master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at California State University Fullerton, where she was the recipient of the Graduate Equity Fellowship. She lives with her family in New Mexico.

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the poetry books This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies (New Michigan Press 2021). He is co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guideand Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Prize.A Kundiman Fellow, he teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the collection of poems Machete and the forthcoming memoir Let Me Count the Ways, as well as the poetry collections Patient Zero and A Larger Country. Hi is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of the anthology, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Henrietta Goodman  is the author of three poetry collections: All That Held Us (BkMk Press, 2018), Hungry Moon (Mountain West Poetry Series, University Press of Colorado, 2013), and Take What You Want (Alice James Books, 2007), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary. Bestiary is the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.

Christopher Salerno  is the author of five books of poetry. His new book, “The Man Grave,” won the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books and is available now. Previous books include “Sun & Urn” (UGA Poetry Prize),“ATM”(Georgetown Poetry Prize),“Minimum Heroic” (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize), and “Whirligig.” A trade book, “How to Write Poetry: A Guided Journal,” was published by Calisto Media in 2020. His poetry has received the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, The Founders Prize from RHINO Magazine, the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Award, the Laurel Review Chapbook Prize, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship. His poems have appeared in New York Times Magazine, New Republic, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Jubilat, and elsewhere. He teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey where he serves as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum.