Emanuel Xavier, is an American poet, spoken word artist, author, editor, screenwriter, and LGBTQ activist born and raised in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn. Associated with the East Village, Manhattan arts scene in New York City, he emerged from the ball culture scene to become one of the first openly gay poets from the Nuyorican movement as a successful writer and advocate for gay youth programs and Latino gay literature.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Canadian-American poet, writer, educator, and social activist. Their writing and performance art focuses on documenting the stories of queer and trans people of color, abuse survivors, mixed-race people and diasporic South Asians and Sri Lankans. A central concern of their work is the interconnection of systems of colonialism, abuse and violence. They are also a writer and organizer within the disability justice movement.
Dara Barrois/Dixon is an American poet and author. She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council. She has been poet-in-residence at the University of Montana, University of Texas Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah; she was the 2005 Louis Rubin chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She lives and works in Factory Hollow in Western Massachusetts. Emily Pettit and Guy Gerard Pettit are her daughter and son.
Cyrus Cassells is an American poet and professor.
Andrea Gibson is an American poet and activist from Calais, Maine, who has lived in Boulder, Colorado since 1999. Gibson's poetry focuses on gender norms, politics, social justice, and LGBTQ topics.
Matthew Dickman is an American poet. He and his identical twin brother, Michael Dickman, also a poet, were born in Portland, Oregon.
Ramón Arroyo was an American playwright, poet and scholar of Puerto Rican descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture, and homosexuality. Arroyo was openly gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.
Autostraddle is a queer and trans-owned online magazine and social network for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, as well as non-binary people and trans people of all genders. The website is a "politically progressive queer feminist media source" that features content covering LGBTQ and feminist news, politics, opinion, culture, arts and entertainment as well as lifestyle content such as DIY crafting, sex, relationships, fashion, food and technology.
Cyrus Dunham is an American writer, actor, and activist. Dunham is a published author, whose debut book, A Year Without A Name: A Memoir, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a published poet, performer, educator, food writer, cultural strategist, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey, whose work has been showcased nationally and internationally. Their second book, More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature Finalist. They are a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship recipient, three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the U.S.
Kai Cheng Thom is a Chinese-Canadian writer, performance artist, mental health community worker, youth counsellor, and former social worker. Thom, a non-binary transgender woman, has published five books, including the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir (2016), the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (2017), a children's book, From the Stars in The Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017), I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World (2019), a book of essays centered on transformative justice, and Falling Back in Love With Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls (2023).
Jos Charles is a trans American poet, writer, translator, and editor. Her book feeld won the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is the founding editor of THEM, the first trans literary journal in the United States.
Kyle Lukoff is a children's book author, school librarian, and former bookseller. He is most known for the Stonewall award-winning When Aidan Became a Brother and for Call Me Max, which gained attention when parents in Texas complained about the book being read in an elementary school classroom and a Utah school district canceled its book program after the book was read to third graders.
Eli Clare is an American writer, activist, educator, and speaker. His work focuses on queer, transgender, and disability issues. Clare was one of the first scholars to popularize the bodymind concept.
Anaïs Duplan is a queer and trans Haitian writer now based in the U.S., with three book publications from Action Books, Black Ocean Press, and Brooklyn Arts Press, along with a chapbook from Monster House Press. His work has been honored by a Whiting Award and a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International. He is a Professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, of which he is also an alum.
Jenny Johnson is an American queer poet.
Chrysanthemum Tran is a Vietnamese American poet, writer, and performer based in Rhode Island.
Alan Pelaez Lopez is a scholar of migration, poetics, and settler colonialism, and an interdisciplinary artist.
Sasha taqʷšəblu (taqwšəblu) LaPointe is an indigenous author from the Pacific Northwest of the United States. She is most known for her 2022 memoir Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, and book of poetry, Rose Quartz.
Shelley Wong is an American poet. In 2022, she released her debut poetry collection, As She Appears, after winning the YesYes Books Pamet River Prize in 2019, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and other publications. Her poetry has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Fire Island Artist Residency, the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others.
