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.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. She currently serves as poetry editor of Sierra Magazine and as professor of English in the University of Mississippi's MFA program, where she previously was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence in 2016-17. She has also taught at the Kundiman Retreat for Asian American writers. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband, Dustin Parsons, and their two sons.
Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, published by Riverdale Avenue Books, is an anthology edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaʻahumanu, and is one of the seminal books in the history of the modern bisexual rights movement. It holds a place that is in many ways comparable to that held by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in the feminist movement.
Pamela Sneed is an American poet, performance artist, actress, activist, and teacher. Her book, Funeral Diva, is a memoir in poetry and prose about growing up during the AIDS crisis, and the winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry.
Samiya A. Bashir is a queer American artist, poet, and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently the June Jordan visiting professor at Columbia University of New York. Bashir is the first black woman recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature. She was also the third black woman to serve as tenured professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Alex Dimitrov is an American poet living in New York City.
CAConrad is an American poet, professor, and the author of seven books. They were based in Philadelphia and later Asheville, North Carolina and Athens, Georgia.
Angelo Nikolopoulos is an American poet.
JD Scott is a Brooklyn, New York and Tampa, Florida based poet and writer. They are the winner of the 2018 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize, which produced the story collection Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day. The collection has been positively covered by multiple literary periodicals including Tor.com, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and Lambda Literary. They are also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Night Errands and FUNERALS & THRONES, published with Birds of Lace. Their debut full length poetry collection, Mask for Mask, was released from New Rivers Press in 2021 and was described by Publishers Weekly as a "startling", "memorable and energetic debut." Their writing has been anthologized in BAX 2015: Best American Experimental Writing and Best New Poets 2017. Scott's writing has been described as full of "something ominous, wolf-like lurking" and "unsurpassable in its #sorrynotsorry earnestness".
Morgan Parker is an American poet, novelist, and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also author of the young adult novel, Who Put This Song On. She has been described as a "multidisciplinary phenom" for her diverse body of work.
Tommy Pico is a Native American writer, poet, and podcast host.
Joseph S. Osmundson is an American biophysicist and writer. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Biology at New York University. Osmundson is the author of various books exploring bodies, queerness, race, and geography.
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.
George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet. He is the author of Birthright and the specimen's apology. Abraham is the Executive Editor of Mizna.
Rosamond S. King is an American poet and literary theorist. She is a literature professor at Brooklyn College, where her courses focus on Caribbean and African literature, sexuality, and performance. In 2017, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry for her debut poetry collection, Rock | Salt | Stone.
Food 4 Thot is an LGBT podcast hosted by Tommy Pico, Denne Michele Norris, Joseph Osmundson, and Fran Tirado. The podcast is described as, "A multiracial mix of queer writers talk about sex, relationships, race, identity, what we like to read, and who we like to read."
KB Brookins is a Black American author, poet, creative nonfiction writer, and visual artist. Brookins is a 2023 Creative Writing fellow with the National Endowment for the Arts and the author of three books: How To Identify Yourself with a Wound, Freedom House, and Pretty: A Memoir.
Jenny Johnson is an American queer poet.
Nancy Agabian is an American writer, activist, and teacher, currently lecturing at New York University, Gallatin. She is of Armenian origin, and her memoir about her childhood, Me as Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, won Lambda Literary's Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction.
