Amy Hirayama is a Hapa writer and educator from Seattle, Washington. She works as the residential workshop administrator for Clarion West, a speculative fiction writer’s workshop. She is also one of the founders of Beam Pedagogy, which provides workshops and retreats focused on educator wellness and changing systems that lead to burnout. Food, family, humor and nature are her favorite things, so she writes about them a lot, sometimes all at once.

Nanya Jhingran is a poet, editor & scholar from Lucknow, India currently living by the coastal margin of the Salish Sea, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People (upon which the city of Seattle was built). She currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at The Simpson Center for the Humanities. She is a PhD Candidate in Literature and Cultural Studies and an MFA Candidate in Poetry at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her dissertation reads contemporary literature by women writing in the context of 20th century partitions in Palestine, Ireland, and India and argues for feminist poetic practice as a form of social reproductive work. Her creative work asks how interiority comes to be shaped by urban experience, development, alienation, and palimpsestic histories of place, with her “home-towns” of Seattle and Lucknow particularly in mind. Her poems have been published in print and digital formats at Poetry Northwest, Canthius, Moss. Lit, The Seventh Wave, among others. Her critical prose has been published in Honey Literary, Adroit Journal, and Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies.

She is an early career editor of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. She served as an Editorial Intern at Farrar, Straus & Giroux in Fall 2022 where she read and assisted editors across all genres. She also serves as Associate Editor at Poetry Northwest where she edits the book reviews section, reads poetry submissions, and pitches in with other editorial tasks. She organizes the “Critics at Large” program, a paid yearlong cultural criticism residency for emerging poet-critics which announced its inaugural cohort in Fall 2022.

Nhatt Nichols is a graphic journalist, poet, and non-fiction cartoonist from the Okanogan. Her work centers around rural narratives, forests, borders, and food systems. You can find her graphic journalism in High Country News, Civil Eats, and The Daily Yonder, and This Party of the Soft Things (Bored Wolves, 2022), a book-length poem about the planer post-people, is inits second printing. Nhatt holds a postgraduate certificate from the Royal Drawing School in London and runs her studio practice from Chimacum. Her illustrated novel, Morels, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves in 2024.

Ricardo Ruiz is a multi-dimensional writer of poetry and prose. The son of potato factory workers, Ricardo hails from Othello, Washington. His work draws from his experience as a first-generation Mexican-American, and from his military service. Ricardo holds an Associate Degree in Business and Accounting from Big Bend Community College, where he was recognized as Student of the Year in both Business and Economics, and English Composition. He also holds a Bachelor of Art in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. While in the military, Ricardo earned the rank of Staff Sergeant while serving on four deployments, two to Afghanistan. His debut collection of poetry reached #1 on Amazon’s Hispanic-American Poetry Chart. He is passionate about elevating marginalized voices from rural communities and takes pride in being a conduit for cultural connection.

Ann Teplick is a poet, playwright, and prose writer with an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. For twenty-three years, she’s been a teaching artist in Seattle public schools; Hugo House; Coyote Central; and Pongo Teen Writing, at King Co. juvenile detention and the Washington State psychiatric hospital. She has received funding from Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4 Culture, Artist Trust, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She is also a Hedgebrook and Jack Straw alumna.

imagine it written in cursive, a water-wave like palindrome- acca (they/them/y’all) is a trans poet, educator and practitioner of abolitionist values and care work through daily actions and play. They facilitate creative interdependence through art and outdoor time since transitioning from ‘ablebodied’ to ‘no longer living that illusion’. They live into the queer disabled poc legacies of ferocity through tenderness, believe crying is a vital technology and have deep reverence for rest. They bring authenticity, adaptability and responsibility to unwinding our collective bodies into something more free. Our capacity to heal is not in question, it is only the matter of remembering ‘how’ together. and so, they write.