is a teaching artist, facilitator, essayist, and poet based in Georgia. She co-facilitates community-centered workshops and is the author of Kaleidoscopic and a contributor to Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race.

Find her on Instagram @nikkigrayarts

is a teaching artist, facilitator, essayist, and poet based in Georgia. She has performed on major stages including the National Poetry Slam, Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam, Write Club Atlanta, the Decatur Book Festival, and the Augusta Arts Festival and was a member of the celebrated slam teams Java Monkey and Art Amok. She co-facilitates Write Start, Camp Write Start, and Harvest Week, immersive writing series that blend daily practice with community-centered workshops. Nikki is the author of the poetry chapbook Kaleidoscopic and a contributor to Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race. Her work has appeared in theatrical productions with the Positive Arts Movement and her essays appear in The Heart of It newsletter and the Work(ing) in Progress Substack. A graduate fellow of The Watering Hole and a full-scholarship attendee of The Heart of It Retreat, Nikki continues to deepen her craft while cultivating creative and reflective communities.

Find her on Instagram @nikkigrayarts

is a queer and disabled self-taught poet and teaching artist.

Find her on Instagram @supsbb ‍| 📚 Learn more about Disability Poetics

is a queer and disabled self-taught poet and teaching artist. Their work has appeared in Squawk Back, Eunoia Review, Rogue Agent, Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine, and more. They have been supported by Seventh Wave, The Poetry Society of New York, and The Heart of It.

Sara Beth brings lived experience, artistic rigor, and a strong commitment to disability justice to every workshop they teach.

Find her on Instagram @supsbb ‍| 📚 Learn more about Disability Poetics

is a freelance writer and digital marketer. She lives in Tusla with her husband and cat, Joan Didion.

Find her on Instagram @lorithewriter | 🎧 Listen to The Poetry Lab Podcast

is from Georgetown, South Carolina.  Her work has been published in a variety of outlets including Honey Literary, Hayden’s Ferry, Emergent Literary, Tidal Basin Review, Root Work Journal, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Rigorous, and A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine, among others. She is a Tin House Workshop and VONA alum and was selected as a PEN America 2022 Emerging Voices Fellow.  She has upcoming work in The Ocean State Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fruit Journal, and Foglifter. Shakeema is the winner of the inaugural Markus D. Manley Award and served as Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Lab in 2024.

Find her on Instagram @shakeema_smalls‍ ‍| 📚 Learn more about Stone & Gourd

Kelsey Bryan-Zwick is a Pushcart Prize-winning author. A multi-modal creative whose debut book of poems, Here Go the Knives, is part memoir, part magical realism, part illustration and focuses on their decades surviving with debilitating scoliosis.

Find them on Instagram @kelsey_the_poet

is a South Asian American bestselling author, spoken word poet, and licensed therapist based in Long Beach, California. She is the author of YELLOW, a full-length collection of poetry and prose published by World Stage Press, which was named Best Poetry Collection of 2021 by Long Beach Post. Originally from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Ravina has performed her work on nationally and internationally acclaimed stages, including the House of Blues and the United Nations. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a touring artist with the spoken word collective Never Speak Long Beach. Ravina’s work has been featured in Yahoo Finance, Voyage LA, SHOUTOUT Atlanta, Livewire, and the Los Angeles Sentinel. She teaches poetry and publishing through the University of Southern California and the Community Literature Initiative and is the founder of “Writing as Healing,” a bimonthly workshop and open mic exploring the intersections of creativity and mental health. Ravina is a co-host of The Poetry Lab Podcast.

Find her at @ravina.340 | 🎧 Listen to The Poetry Lab Podcast

Talicha J. is a Black, queer poet, and workshop facilitator. Her work has been featured in several literary magazines and on the popular Button Poetry YouTube channel.

Find her at talichajpoetry.com

Kristen Brida’s poetry has appeared in Fairy Tale Review, New Delta Review, The Journal, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she runs a BookTok account dedicated to showing poetry is for everyone.

Find her on TikTok @booksby_kb

Danielle Mitchell is an intersectional feminist, poet, and teaching artist. She is host of The Poetry Lab Podcast and an artist for the California Creative Corps. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Transom, and others.

Find her at imaginarydani.com

Karen Zheng is a first-generation, queer, Chinese-American. Her poetry has been featured in Emerson Review, Sine Theta Magazine, Honey Literary, The Wave, and elsewhere.

Find more at karenzheng.com

Keimhaney Carlisle is a writer and poet currently based in Philadelphia, originally from California. She was a Get Lit-Words Ignite Fellow in the Summer of 2021 and served as an AmeriCorps member. Keimahney is passionate about human expression and social advocacy.

hr souffrant is a Chicago-based Haitian American writer, producer, and facilitator. souffrant's literary work has been featured in numerous online literary publications at Oberlin College, Hair Trigger Issue 41, Medium, Picture This Post, and Sixty Inches from Center.

Find her on Instagram @dat_haytian

Annie Freshwater is a lover of mythology, exotic houseplants, and dinosaur fossils. Her work explores the ways in which we populate our inner and outer landscapes with ghosts of our own making.

Find her on Instagram @onewingedflaw

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine and graduated with a BA in Psychology and Literature at Mount Allison University. She lives in Texas now with her two lovely children.

Find her on Instagram @thatpluckygirl

Allison Baldwin is a poet and disability advocate. Her work has been published in print and online, most recently in the Right to Life anthology, published by Folkways Press.

Find her on Instagram @the_awakened_poet

Leonora Simonovis is a Venezuelan American poet, editor and educator. Her debut poetry collection, Study of the Raft, won the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Leonora is the Reviews Editor at Ecotheo Review and the Currents Editor at terrain.org.

Find her at leonorasimonovis.com

Yomalis Rosario is a Black Dominican poet & teacher who was born and raised in Washington Heights, NYC. She has poems forthcoming in The Marbled Sigh and Hot Pot Magazine and writes about creativity, spirituality, & liberation in her monthly newsletter Letters From the Root.

Find her at yomalisrosario.com

Bridget Kriner is a community college professor in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Rattle (Poets Respond), Book of Matches, Shelia-Na-Gig, Whiskey Island and Split this Rock, where she won First Place in the Abortion Rights Poetry Contest in 2012.

Find her on Instagram @bridgetakriner