Carmen Baca taught high school and college English for thirty-six years before retiring in 2014. She is an author of six books and multiple short publications from prose to poetry in a variety of genres. As a Chicana and a Norteña native to New Mexico, she keeps her culture’s traditions alive through regionalism to prevent them from dying completely. She is a recipient of New Mexico Magazine’s 2023 True Hero award for preserving her culture through story telling. Two of her short works were nominated to Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize also in 2023.
Allayna Benedict is an undergraduate student at Texas A&M majoring in English. She grew up in El Paso, Texas, and has been writing poetry since she was 13. She got her first poem published when she was 16 with the America Library of Poetry, leading her to decide to pursue a degree in literature and writing.
Hannah Elizabeth Bowling is an alumna of Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas and Texas A&M University in College Station. Her dissertation examines African diasporic and continental adaptations of Shakespeare as articulations of the Black experience. By using historical, cultural, performance, and textual methods to read novels, films, and drama, her work elucidates how Black storytelling serves as community-building, -sustaining, and – withholding praxis. “No sabo kid” represents her first major creative publication. Her creative work wrestles with community formation and identity, particularly in her own context as a white Latina academic working in a predominantly white field on ethnic/racial studies. Her days are spent teaching literature and composition courses, and her nights with her husband and two small dogs as companions.
Kamila Buitrago-Arias, colombian. A creative writer whose Moon in Gemini makes her use writing as her amulet to walk through this world. What she values most in life are the treasures hidden in people’s stories. While she is discovering her own, you can find her @ka_buitragoa on Instagram and follow her work in her monthly online newsletter, Kamila Escribe. She currently resides in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Ivylove Cudjoe, born and raised in Ghana, moved to the US in 2019 to further her education on the Spanish language and culture. Ivylove is pursuing a doctoral degree in Texas A&M University with the Department of Global Languages and Cultures. Currently in her third year, she has research interests in Africana Studies, Latin American Literature, Language Pedagogy and Film Studies. She holds a master’s degree in Hispanic Studies from Western Michigan University. She holds a great love for poetry and has a collection of poems published with the 12th volume of the WMU graduate student research journal, The Hilltop Review, under the title, “As I go along.” Ivylove’s love for poetry has brought her into contact with poetic centered projects and events such as that of the “Landscapes of Belonging” project at present in Texas A&M University. She hopes to share more poetic pieces with the world to serve as a bridge for others to travel to her thoughts and self.
Faith Ebiere Eguolo Odele is studying Communication at Texas A&M University. She is interested in researching the evolution (and regression) of gender rhetoric through pre- colonial (Western), colonial, and “post-colonial” contexts, with a particular interest in theorizing and decolonizing gender and racial rhetoric. She hopes to inspire meaningful conversations and foster understanding, compassion, justice, hope, love, and life with her writing and scholarship. Her mind is a constant garden of musings, and sometimes they translate to poetry, prose, essays, or dialogues. In addition to PhDing and musing, she likes to travel to see the world, meet different people of different nations, enjoy their music, learn their songs, dances, and stories, and taste their delicacies.
Graciela Escalante is a graduate student at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Graciela’s writing has many themes dealing with family, love, self-discovery, mental health, and the Chicana/o experience. Graciela writes fiction, poetry, and scholarly essays. Graciela has had some of her poetry published in Voices De La Luna, The Grey Zine, and La Raiz Magazine. Graciela also is working on a scholarly essay on Tim Burton’s Wednesday Addams that will be featured in an anthology of writing titled Fashioning the Borderlands. Graciela hopes that her writing can reach others and provide representation along with comfort. She hopes to continue writing—she is a writer for life.
Dr. Adriana Maria Garriga-López is Poetry Editor at the NACLA Report on the Americas and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL. Dr. Garriga-López holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University (2010.) Garriga-López is a medical and environmental anthropologist specializing in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Her research analyzes cultural dynamics at the intersections of health, environmental disruption, and decolonization. In addition to her scholarship, Garriga-López reads, writes, and translates poetry and short stories in English and Spanish. Her poetry, short stories, and translations have been published in several academic journals, blogs, and anthologies. Dr. Garriga-López was born and raised in Santurce, Puerto Rico. She currently resides in South Florida. Her website is www.adrianagarrigalopez.com.
Vianney A. Gavilanes is a Mexican migrant, educator, scholar, and writer raised in San Leandro, California. Her work centers on language, identity, justice, and homemaking themes. Growing up as an undocumented migrant child left an indelible mark. Her experience with losing, finding, and continually affirming her voice as a brown body in a perpetual sea of whiteness informs her writing and teaching. Recognizing the healing power of writing, Vianney works alongside youth to cultivate their creative self-expression through writing and the arts as part of our collective liberation. When Vianney is not writing, teaching, or reading, you can find her hiking the local Bay Area trails, playing Badminton with her sobrinas y sobrinos, or tomando cafecito with her mom and sister.
Arely Herrera writes: “Geographies of our antepasados and futuros of our relational place-making mark our realities as plural ones. I’ve known my reality to be plural since I was in the womb. My mom was six months pregnant with me when she took a flight from Lynwood, California to Memphis a sembrar seeds with a ranchero from Zacatecas, i.e. my dad.* I was of the first generation of Herreras to be born en El Norte and the first in my family to be born in da Souf. Despite the geographic and cultural differences among Memphis, Lynwood and Villanueva, Zacatecas, they are each pivotal places of my plural realities. A new complex factor would be added when I embarked on a PhD program in College Station, Texas. Whereas Lynwood, Memphis and Zac warm my spirit with histories of La Huelga, stories of the laborious days en el molino y el barbecho, and images of I AM A MAN that remind me of our people’s strength, College Station froze my soul, and I was unable to exist as I once did, for a while.”
Alexa Hurtado-Montaño was born in Cali, Colombia. She is a poet and a PhD student in Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University (College Station, Texas), holding a degree in literature from Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia). She was a Martin Luther King MLK-Fellowship Program Scholar and a recipient of the Diploma in Leadership for Political Advocacy at the Catholic University, through which she strengthened her cultural initiatives and community processes. Her interests lie in Afro-Colombian, Afro-Latin American, and Afro-Caribbean literature by women. She is an organizer and coordinator of the annual event “Black Women Poetry” at Texas A&M University and has participated in events such as several conferences and poetry recitals. In her anthology Confesiones de Melencó (2024), her creations are an act of poetic justice that vindicate the body as territory and resignify her daily life as an Afro-Colombian woman.
Raina J. León, PhD, is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships and residencies with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. The Acentos Review has published over 1000 Latinx voices in over 15 years. She recently retired early as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there. She currently supports poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA program of the University of Southern Maine. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.
Jordan Nixon is a multidisciplinary storyteller who recently graduated with her Masters in Communications from Texas A&M Unviersity. Her work explores the ways those at the intersection of marginalized identities make place, preserve memory, and formulate identity.
Rick Pulos (he/him/his) is a scholar-artist currently in his third year in the PhD in Communication at Texas A&M University. He holds a BA in Film Studies from Yale University, an MA in Media Arts from Long Island University, Brooklyn and an MA in Strategic Communication from Regent University. His research focuses on the community and culture of fandoms and the overall influence of popular culture in our everyday lives. His film and theatre creations are situated at the intersections of life, scholarship, and creativity. He is especially interested in the ways in which marginalized folks navigate and transform fan spaces and communities that have traditionally been white, male, and heteronormative. At the heart of all his work is the art of storytelling, whether through writing, filmmaking, or theatre. Rick is also interested in how people find and/or make community in places like senior centers, community theatres, arts studios, dance studios, and other publicly available spaces where people congregate to build relationships. His fierce love of pop culture is tempered by his research on (mis)representations/uses/misuses of gender, race, class, and sexuality in mainstream media and by major media companies. Rick is an interpretive scholar who often integrates ethnographic film and media making into his work.
Eduardo Ramos is a Dominican poet from New York. His poetry has appeared and is forthcoming in Fahmidan Journal, Lit. 202, Writers Resist, and Partially Shy Magazine.
josé rivers alfaro is the author of Something More Splendid Than Two published by punctumbooks press (2022). He is an artist who teaches writing and literature. Raised in Sacramento, California, he attended Cosumnes River College, the community college where he currently works as a professor. He earned his B.A. in English Literature at San Francisco State University. Following he earned his Ph.D. in English at University of California, Riverside, focusing on 19th-century American Literature, Queer Latinx Studies, and Dance/Performance Studies. Before returning to Sacramento, he learned how to dance salsa and bachata. Since then, he continues to spend a lot of time thinking about how he can make the magic of the dance floor happen on the page.
Magda V. Rodriguez is a doctoral student and graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures at Texas A&M University. She is from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas; she was born in Mexico but raised in Texas. Her life in the border was one that left the Rio Grande River as a river rather than a national divide as it was crossed on a routine basis, which has marked her view of the self. Her background has garnered an interest in Latinx studies which is her primary field of focus as a scholar as well as influencing her literary themes and voice. The following two poems are a reflection on herself and her place of origin as a Mexican-American woman from the Rio Grande Valley.
R. Joseph Rodríguez is the author of This Is Our Summons Now: Poems (FlowerSong Press, 2022), a 2023 finalist for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the author of research articles, critical essays, and books. His poems have appeared in California English, Entre Magazine, and The Texas Observer, among other journals. Currently, he teaches language arts and reading at an early college high school and is a teacher educator at local colleges and universities in central Texas. Follow him on social media @escribescribe, or write to him at escribescribe@gmail.com.
Javier Sandoval grew up in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico and studied creative writing under Forrest Gander and John Wideman at Brown University. He now teaches at the University of Alabama where he also served as Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review. His own work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Salamander, Massachusetts Review, and Indiana Review, and he’s been the recipient of Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize and swamp pink’s Indigenous Writers Award. His chapbook, Blue Moon Looming, will soon be published by CutBank. But mostly, he loves to smoke on the stoop with his lady. You can follow him on IG for updates and jokes @JavierWantsCandy.
Isadoro Saturno (Barquisimeto, 1987) is a poet, translator, editor, and children’s book author living in Atlanta. His first book, Conejo y Conejo (Ekaré, 2018), won the Los Mejores del Banco del Libro award and was translated into Chinese in 2020. In 2022, he was selected for the Señal call from Ugly Duckling Presse, which resulted in the publication of the plaquette Dear Parent or Guardian / Estimado representante (New York, 2023). That year, he published Shigeru Ban Builds a Better World (Tra Publishing, Miami), receiving a star review from The Horn Book magazine. His work has been featured in various anthologies, collections, magazines, digital portals, and fanzines, including the one for the II Rafael Cadenas Young Poets Prize (Caracas, 2017) where he was awarded third place, PROVEA’s Poesía contra la opresión 1920–2018 (Caracas, 2019), and most recently on eXpuestXs (El BeiSmAn PrESs, Chicago, 2024).
Michael Zendejas is the Senior Hybrid Acquisitions Editor for Abode Press. He received a Fiction MFA at UMass Amherst and runs the film blog, The Chicano Film Shelf. An inaugural recipient of the Rose Fellowship, a Juniper Fellow, a 2022 winner of the James W. Foley Memorial Prize and a member of the inaugural cohort of the Emerging Writers Fellowship, he consults and teaches classes on Fiction, Poetry and Screenwriting via GrubStreet. His work is featured or forthcoming in: Stanchion, North American Review, Unstamatic, Five2One Magazine and elsewhere.