Elizabeth M. Castillo is a British-Mauritian poet, writer, and a two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Elizabeth explores the different countries and cultures she grew up with, as well as themes of race & ethnicity, motherhood, womanhood, language, love, loss and grief, and a touch of magical realism. Her writing has been featured in publications and anthologies in the UK, US, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East. Her bilingual, debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras is for sale on Amazon, and her debut chapbook "Not Quite an Ocean" will be published by Nine Pens Press in 2022/2023. You can connect with her on Twitter and IG as @EMCWritesPoetry, or on her website www.elizabethmcastillo.net. 

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, a psychology professor, and a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She lived in the Netherlands for 22 years and translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations appear in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, the Tahoma Literary Review, the Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and And Haunt the World (a collaboration with Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). Camille Dungy (Orion Magazine) chose her full-length General Release from the Beginning of the World (January 2023, Free Verse Editions) as one of the 14 Recommended Poetry Collections for Winter 2022. She gets restless.

Farnaz Fatemi, an Iranian American poet and writer, and Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate for 2023 & 2024, is a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective. She was formerly a writing instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر, was published in September 2022. It won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith, and received a Starred Review from Publisher’s Weekly.  Some of her poems and lyric essays appear in Poem-a-Day (Poets.org), Tab Journal, Pedestal Review, Nowruz Journal, Grist Journal and Tupelo Quarterly.  More at farnazfatemi.com