Born to South Asian immigrant artists, Jaia Hamid Bashir’s work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Only Poems, The Virginia Quarterly,  Poetry Daily, The Rumpus, and The Oxonian Review. She is the winner of the 2020 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2024 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, a finalist of the 2025 Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize, a semifinalist for the 2025 Philip Levine Prize, and the 2025 Ralph Hamilton Editors' Prize winner awarded through  Rhino Poetry. Her chapbook "Desire/Halves" was published in 2024 by Nine Syllables Press out of Smith College.  A Columbia University graduate, Jaia lives in the American West with her partner.

https://www.jaihamidbashir.com/

 Gabrielle Bates's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poem-a-Day, and American Poetry Review. Her debut collection, Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Originally from Alabama, Bates is currently based in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center, the Tin House Writers' Workshops, and elsewhere. You can follow her on ig (@gabrielle_bates_) and twitter (@GabrielleBates).www.gabriellebat.es

Molly Olguín is a queer writer, educator, and monster aficionado. Her collection The Sea Gives Up the Dead was chosen by Carmen Maria Machado for the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. She has stories in magazines like Quarterly West and The Normal School. She was the recipient of the Loft Mentor Series Fellowship in 2019. With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the audio drama The Pasithea Powder. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students in Seattle, Washington. www.mollyolguin.com

 Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of the novel Elita (published by TriQuarterly Press/Northwestern University Press in January, 2025) and the story collection Outer Stars, which won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (UNT Press) and will be published in the autumn of 2025. Her three previous collections of short fiction are What We Do with the Wreckage, which won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (University of Georgia Press in 2018); Swimming with Strangers (Chronicle Books, 2008); and This Life She’s Chosen (Chronicle Books, 2005). Kirsten’s short fiction has been honored with a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and her stories have appeared widely in journals, among them The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, One Story, and McSweeney’s. She has held fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and the Willa Cather Foundation. Kirsten is the fiction editor for Crab Creek Review and a member of the English Department faculty at Seattle’s Bush School.

www.kirstensundberglunstrum.com