Achy Obejas is a Cuban-American writer and translator focused on personal and national identity issues, living in Oakland, California. She frequently writes on her sexuality and nationality, and has received numerous awards for her creative work. Obejas' stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and many other publications. Some of her work was originally published in Esto no tiene nombre, a Latina lesbian magazine published and edited by tatiana de la tierra, which gave voice to the Latina lesbian community. Obejas worked as a journalist in Chicago for more than two decades. For several years, she was also a writer in residence at the University of Chicago, University of Hawaii, DePaul University, Wichita State University, and Mills College in Oakland, California. She is currently a writer/editor for Netflix on the bilingual team in the Product Writing department.
Josephine Louise Miles was an American poet and literary critic; the first woman tenured in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She wrote over a dozen books of poetry and several works of criticism.
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College.
Monique T.D. Truong is a Vietnamese American writer living in Brooklyn, New York.
Janice Gould (1949—2019) was a Koyangk'auwi Maidu writer and scholar. She was the author of Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather and co-editor with Dean Rader of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Her book Doubters and Dreamers (2011) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award.
Josephine Jacobsen was a Canadian-born American poet, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She was appointed the twenty-first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971. In 1997, she received the Poetry Society of America’s highest award, the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.
Opal Palmer Adisa is a Jamaica-born award-winning poet, novelist, performance artist and educator. Anthologized in more than 400 publications, she has been a regular performer of her work internationally. Professor Emeritus at California College of the Arts, Dr. Adisa is also the current Director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, where she currently resides.
Marilyn Chin (陈美玲) is a prominent Chinese American poet and writer, an activist and feminist, an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.
Alfred Arteaga was a Chicano poet, writer, and scholar.
Elizabeth Woody is an American Navajo-Warm Springs-Wasco-Yakama artist, author, and educator. In March 2016, she was the first Native American to be named poet laureate of Oregon by Governor Kate Brown.
Rusty Morrison is an American poet and publisher. She received a BA in English from Mills College in Oakland, California, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga, California, and an MA in Education from California State University, San Francisco. She has taught in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, and was Poet in Residence at Saint Mary’s College in 2009. She has also served as a visiting poet at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Redlands, Redlands, California; University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona; Boise State University, Boise, Idaho; Marylhurst University, Marylhurst, Oregon, and Milikin University, Decatur, Illinois. In 2001, Morrison and her husband, Ken Keegan, founded Omnidawn Publishing in Richmond, California and continue to work as co-publishers. She contracted Hepatitis C in her twenties but, like most people diagnosed with this disease, did not experience symptoms for several years. Since then, a focus on issues relating to disability has developed as an area of interest in her writing.
Sandy Pool is a Canadian poet, editor and professor of creative writing. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections and a chapbook published by Vallum Editions. Her first collection, Exploding Into Night was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English language poetry at the 2010 Governor General's Awards.
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.
M. Evelina Galang is an American novelist, short story writer, editor, essayist, educator, and activist of Filipina descent. Her novel One Tribe won the AWP Novel of the Year Prize in 2004.
Terry Acebo Davis is a Filipino American artist and nurse. Her art is thematically linked to her family and her origins as a Filipino American.
Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) is a written arts organization that was founded in 1999 by Pulitzer-prize winning author Junot Diaz, along with award-winning author Elmaz Abinader, Víctor Díaz and Diem Jones in order to provide emerging writers of color with workshops and mentoring by established writers of color. Since its founding, over 2,000 aspiring writers from around the world have been involved in their programs.
PEN Oakland is a branch of PEN, an international literary and human rights organization. PEN Oakland was founded in 1989 by Ishmael Reed and co-founders Floyd Salas, Claire Ortalda and Reginald Lockett. PEN Oakland annually sponsors the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, named for the late poet and faculty member of U.C. Berkeley’s English Department. The award honors well-known and emerging Bay Area and international authors for excellence in multicultural literature. Past and present PEN Oakland board members include: Elmaz Abinader, Opal Palmer Adisa, Kim Addonizio, Robert Mailer Anderson, Jesse Beagle, Judith Cody, Lucha Corpi, Nicole Corrales, John Curl, Lucille Lang Day, Sharon Doubiago, Cheryl Fabio, Adelle Foley, Jack Foley (poet), Andrew Phillip Hayes, Herbert R. Kohl, Reginald Lockett, Kirk Lumpkin, Kim McMillon, Gerald Nicosia, Linda Noel, Claire Ortalda, Ishmael Reed, Tennessee Reed, Tony R. Rodriguez, Floyd Salas, Ntozake Shange, Gary Soto, Al Young, and Maw Shein Win. PEN Oakland is based in Oakland, CA.
Sarah Quigley is a New Zealand-born writer.
Julia Chinyere Oparah, formerly Julia Sudbury, is a professor and department chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College in Oakland California, where she also played a major role in establishing its Queer Studies Program. She is an activist-scholar, a community organizer, and an intellectual focused on producing relevant scholarship in accompaniment to social justice movements.
Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is currently housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
