Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Emanuel Xavier, is an American poet, spoken word artist, author, editor, 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 and the Nuyorican movement to become a successful poet, 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’s 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.
Cyrus Cassells is an American poet and professor.
Zoe Whittall is a Canadian poet, novelist and TV writer. She has published five novels and three poetry collections to date.
Vivek Shraya is a Canadian musician, writer, and visual artist. She currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, where she is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Calgary. As a trans femme of colour, Shraya often incorporates her identity in her music, writing, visual art, theatrical work, and films. She is a seven-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, and considered a Great Canadian Filmmaker of the Future by CBC Arts.
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 reform, 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.
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 Canadian writer and former social worker. Thom, a non-binary trans woman, has published four 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), and 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.
Oliver Baez Bendorf is an American poet.
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.
Topaz Winters is the pen name of Singaporean-American writer Priyanka Balasubramanian Aiyer.
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.
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.
