2025 Retreat Faculty
Poetry Instructor
Ariana Brown
Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American writer and the author of We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). A national collegiate poetry slam champion, Ariana holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies, an M.F.A. in Poetry, and M.S. in Library Science. She lives and works in Houston, TX, where she teaches creative writing to teens. She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for over a decade.
Poetry Instructor
mónica teresa ortiz
mónica teresa ortiz is a poet, memory worker, and critic born, raised, and based in Texas. Their work has appeared in Scalawag Magazine, The Tiny, Mizna, and the Brooklyn Rail. Their poetry collection, Book of Provocations (Host Publications) was published in 2024. Find them on Instagram @ridingwiththepoet. They call for the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea, and believe empire will fall in our lifetime.
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Nonfiction Instructor
KB Brookins
KB Brookins is a Black queer and trans writer, educator, and cultural worker from Texas. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024) won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Follow them online at @earthtokb.
Speculative Fiction Instructor
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Her queer horror novelette Helen House (Burrow Press) was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the former managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, Foglifter, and others. Some of her culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She was a 2023-2024 Tin House Reading Fellow and a 2023 Lambda writer in residence. Her fiction will be featured in the upcoming anthology Be Gay, Do Crimes, out from Dzanc Books in 2025.
Short Fiction Instructor
Stephanie Macias
Stephanie Macias is a musician, writer, and artist based in Austin, TX. She has been performing since 2000. From 2011 to 2018 she performed under the name Little Brave. She has an MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas. Her stories have been a finalist for the Jesmyn Ward Prize in Fiction and longlisted for the DISQUIET Prize. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Brink, No Tokens, Southern Humanities Review, and more. Between the years of 2003 and 2016, she made her living as a touring singer-songwriter, an illustrator, a photographer, and a painter. She is the managing editor at American Short Fiction and is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.
Ariana Brown
Poetry Cohort
Ashley C. Lanuza
Ashley is a writer, editor, spoken word poet, and lifelong learner from Los Angeles. Her writing focuses on identity, family, and mental health as a second-generation Filipina American. Ashley is a proud UCLA Bruin and is working on her Master’s in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge.
Melissa Shoemake
Melissa Holm Shoemake lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two sons where she works in college administration at Emory University. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi and her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Southern Humanities Review, The Shore, Harpur Palate, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology and Best New Poets 2024. Her chapbook, Ab.Sin.The. is available from Dancing Girl Press.
Jen Hallaman
Jen Hallaman lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband, baby daughter, and two twenty-pound(!) cats. She works at a local independent bookstore, where she spends her lunch break writing poems. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, DIAGRAM, Little Patuxent Review, Appalachian Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Shore, and many others. Find her at www.jenhallaman.com
Sara Santistevan
Sara Santistevan is an emerging Latina poet. She received the 2021 Reyna Grande Scholarship, which gave her the resources to finish her chapbook, The Root from which Freedom Blossoms. She has work published in Shō Poetry Journal, The Acentos Review, Latin@ Literatures, Querencia Press, and elsewhere. She is a reader, copyeditor, and occasional editorial writer for F(r)iction. In both her artistic and editorial work, Sara enjoys transformative writing that builds bridges between historical and personal narratives. She has a soft spot for walkable cities, flavored lattes, quirky earrings, and anything cute—especially cats! Learn more at www.sarasantistevan.com.
Bud Taliaferro
Bud Taliaferro (they) is a long-time listener, first-time caller into the world of sharing poetry. They are a Nez Perce, transgender multi-disciplinary artist who holds a BS in Technical Theatre from West Texas A&M. After almost 30 years in their Texan diaspora, Bud recently moved to Washington state in large effort to refine and redefine their connection with the land and their art through their avid journaling, bird watching, and analog living practices. They explore Spirituality through nature and ritual and are always looking for ways to weave ecology, class, and identity.
JP Legarte
JP Legarte is a Filipinx American graduate student at Emerson College pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry). Outside his studies, he serves as a senior editor and the Community and Grant Development Assistant for Brink Literacy Project and F(r)iction, a senior poetry reader and the Digital Director for Redivider, and the Director of Creative Operations for Collections of Transience. His poem “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” was chosen for the 2025 Mayor’s Poetry Program in Boston. He is also a 2025 Lit Fest Emerging Writer Fellowship in Poetry finalist. You can follow him on Instagram at @jpl091.
Maria Picone
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Bethany Moore
Bethany Joy Moore is a poet and theologian from Shelter Island, NY. She holds a Masters of Divinity and was the 2025 recipient of the Bliss Morehead Poetry Grant. She enjoys reading new poems and swimming in the cold Atlantic for the same reason— they take her breath away.
Alexis F.
Alexis F. (she/her) is a Southern writer and big sister. Raised in Southeastern Virginia, her work aims to center untold stories of land and kin, while shouting for liberation for those oppressed. A 2025 Abode Press Fellow and a lover of both English and AAVE’s habitual “be,” Alexis received her B.A from The College of William and Mary and her Juris Doctor from North Carolina Central University’s School of Law. Alexis’ chapbook, exploring themes of womanism, religion, and Southern identity, is in progress. Her work has been published in Yellow Arrow Journal and she resides in the "DMV."
Daad Sharfi
Daad Sharfi is a Sudanese poet and advocate who aims to write against the nation-state, rebuild outside its fictitious borders and create towards the possibilities that exist on the other side of a system, upended. She is indebted to her first writing community, ¡Oye! Spoken Word, for holding her words with boundless care and grounding her in poetry as a collective experience. Daad has received fellowships from DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Brooklyn Poets and TinHouse. Her work can be found in 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (Vol. I), PANK, Sawti, Voicemail Poems, the Seventh Wave and elsewhere.
Julissa Rodriguez
Julissa Rodríguez is a proud gender expansive Queer Boricua/Taino. They are an educator, musician, writer, and visual & performing artist. Their free expression through percussion, theatre, dance, visual arts, poetry & spoken word is meant to honor our African, Indigenous, and Queer/Trans Ancestors, open spaces for community building/connection, and challenge patriarchal limitations placed on women and other marginalized genders. Julissa has been a featured artist, performer, speaker and facilitator in venues and educational centers around the country and across the globe.
Kris Cho
Kris Cho (any pronouns/형) is an artist, educator, and poet hailing from Mid-Missouri. Though they started as a slam poet at the collegiate level, their written work has been featured in Visions Literary Magazine, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Glass Mountain Magazine. They are a 2023 Best of the Net nominee, a 2024 RWW Poetry Fellow, and 2025 Periplus Fellow. Their debut chapbook Chosun Cowboy (Abode Press) will be published in 2026.
mónica teresa ortiz
Poetry Cohort
Ivan Zhao
Ivan Zhao (he/him) is a poet, designer, and web artist based in San Francisco interested in nonlinear narratives, forms, and mechanics that reckon with digital, diasporic, and queer identity. His art interrogates computational and individual agency, specifically around the language of words and silences, and his research revolves around tools, systems, and play. When he’s not making weird things on the internet, he’s making bread and soup in the kitchen.
Sofía Aguilar
Sofía Aguilar is a Chicana writer, editor, teaching artist, community organizer, and library professional based on the traditional homelands of the Tongva, Kizh, and Chumash peoples (Los Angeles, California). Her work has appeared in the L.A. Times, Refinery29 Somos, and New Orleans Review, among other publications. She is the author of zine and chapbook publications including STREAMING SERVICE: golden shovels made for tv (2021) and STREAMING SERVICE: season two (2022), both self-published; LOS ANGELES: the zine, co-edited with poet Paula Macena (2025); and amor., published by Bottlecap Press in March 2025.
Alina Moore
Alina Moore (she/her) is a black lesbian writer from Chicago. Her work centers the BIPOC identity, the (L)GBT community and feminist thought. Her poetry has been published in Wildscape Literary Journal, Homesick Zine Magazine and others. She works as a public librarian by day. She enjoys making digital collages when words are just not enough. She spends her free time playing board games and movie-watching with her wife and pets.
nat raum
nat raum (b. 1996) is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of this book will not save you, fruits of the valley, random access memory, and others. Past and upcoming publishers of their writing include Gone Lawn, Split Lip Magazine, beestung, and BRUISER. Find them online at natraum.com.
Yunkyo Moon-Kim
Yunkyo Moon-Kim is a poet and education worker residing between mountains and seas. Their poems call for, and are reference to, the future that is borderless. Newfound published their debut chapbook, Transuding, in 2024.
M. K. Thekkumkattil
M. K. Thekkumkattil (they/them) is a trans, disabled, kinky writer and nurse whose liberation is bound up with Palestinian Liberation. They write about care work, kink, relationship with land, among other things. They received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and fellowships from Queer Art Mentorship, Lambda Literary, VONA, and Writing by Writers. Their work can be found in Black Warrior Review, smoke and mold, ___figuration, Autostraddle, Fence Magazine, Year Round Queer, & In the Future There Are No Hospitals. IG: thekkumkattilmk
Teri Vela
Teri Vela (she/her) is a queer latina poet and mother. She is an assistant poetry editor with Split Lip Magazine. She has an MFA from the low residency program at Warren Wilson College. Teri stands in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and an end to genocides worldwide.
Laura Lucía Rosado
Laura Lucía Rosado is a Caribbean multidisciplinary cultural worker based in Miami, Florida. She is deeply guided by her roots from Puerto Rico and Cuba, and her experiences living in Little Havana. She interrogates, challenges, and engages her community to shift our relationships with local and international oppressed populations toward principled solidarity. She explores the complicated cultural and political conditions in Florida and merges her experiences as a local creative and political worker. She strives to reject the pressure to be one-dimensional and pick a single practice, and forge herself as a multifaceted artist who pulls from an abundance of inspirations.
Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi
Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi is a Black mother who spends time with forests and waters on unceded T’Sou-ke lands. Her work strives to instigate action in service to world-building, social change, and collaboration. Her poems live in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, MAYDAY, Torch, Rise Up Review, and other portals. She is the author of the chapbooks EVERYTHING GOOD IS DYING (Deep Vellum Publishing) and Moon Woman (Thoughtcrime Press). Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2025. Travel with her online at fatimaayanmalikahirsi.com or @fatimaayanmalika.
Mac Wilder
Mac Wilder (ze/zem/zyrs or any pronouns) is a homebound high femme whose work explores queercrip sexuality, high-control Christianity, & their intersection. Zyr work appears in Beestung, manywor(l)ds.place, Corporeal, The Garlic Press, SCAB, and is forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom and Just Femme & Dandy.
Noel Gaylord
Noel is a poet living. He likes the word megaphone.
Ana Camacho Espiritu
Ana Camacho Espiritu is an art practitioner and strategist. Ana spent her adolescence writing on tumblr and almost 12 years living as an undocumented migrant in the USA. She contributes her diligent internationalist perspective to both of these periods. After eight years in the migrant rights movement, she is now in prayerful recovery and started a worker cooperative, Cinco Rios Multilingual Initiatives. A happy cofounder of the San Anto Zine Fest, she invites you to self publish whatever you can, wherever you are. Visit her website and sign the guestbook for good luck ok7a.neocities.org
KB Brookins
Nonfiction Cohort
MT Vallarta
MT Vallarta (they/them) is a poet and Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. They are the author of the poetry collection, What You Refuse to Remember, winner of the 2022 Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize. A Lambda Literary fellow, Kundíman fellow, and Pushcart Prize nominee, their poetry and creative nonfiction can be found in The Selkie, Shō, Madwomen in the Attic, Nat. Brut, Apogee, and others.
Maya Williams
Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who was selected as Portland, ME's seventh poet laureate for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Eir debut poetry collection Judas & Suicide (Game Over Books, 2023) was selected as a finalist for a New England Book Award. Their second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date (Harbor Editions, 2023), was selected as a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. Their third poetry collection, What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway?, was selected as one of four winners of Garden Party Collective's chapbook prize in 2024.
Celeste Chan
Celeste Chan is a writer and artist schooled by Do-It-Yourself culture and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx, NY. She creates across genres. Celeste co-founded Queer Rebels, toured the country with Sister Spit, facilitated youth LGBTQ history workshops, and most recently served as Artist in Residence at San Francisco Public Library.
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Dr. Cecilia Caballero
Based in Los Angeles, Dr. Cecilia Caballero is a single mother, poet, writer, teaching artist, and university lecturer. Cecilia is the inaugural recipient of The Kenyon Review’s Julia Alvarez Scholarship and she has received support from the Octavia Butler Earthseed fellowship, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship, Periplus, the Abolitionist Teaching Network, and the California Arts Council fellowship, among others. Her latest work appears in Lucky Jefferson, Strange Horizons, and Witness Magazine. As a teaching artist, Cecilia facilitates writing wellness workshops for BIPOC folks. She is currently writing a memoir and a poetry collection.
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Odalis Garcia Gorra
Odalis Garcia Gorra is a PhD candidate and writer who forever calls Miami home. Her academic work revolves around diasporic Caribbean Latinx identity and digital cultures. Her essays, reviews, and other creative work has been featured in Palabritas, Anxy Magazine, LatinaMediaCo, and Film Cred. In a past life she worked as a freelance journalist reporting for WLRN and Latino USA. When she's not watching TV or at the movies she is having very strong feelings about empanadas and Cuban food.
Amy Zhou
Amy Zhou 周纯 (they/she) is an emerging Han Chinese Canadian settler writer, community planner, organizer and researcher raised on unceded Algonquin land (Ottawa, Canada) and currently located on unceded Ohlone land (Oakland, California). They have been published in Spacing Magazine, Harvard Urban Review, Journal for Civic Media, Berkeley Planning Journal, Knock LA, and have written a variety of zines on gentrification and displacement. They were a member of the 2022 cohort of Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab and a 2024 Periplus fellow. Their work has received support from Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, ArtTogether, Seventh Wave, Abode Press.
MP Vare
MP Vare is a disabled transgender parent, intuitive artist, and community-trained writer, including studying creative nonfiction and poetry at Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. MP’s creative life is shaped by becoming a later-in-life parent, the infertility journey that preceded parenthood, and the gender affirmation journey that followed. They are dazzled by neuroplasticity, and are actively reparenting themself while raising three children with their spouse in an intergenerational household on Lenapehoking in Philadelphia, PA. MP’s poetry and art can be found in Opal Age Tribune, Beyond Queer Words, and Peatsmoke Journal.
Shelley Gaske
Shelley Gaske is a queer, disabled adoptee, and cancer survivor based in Oregon. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tin House, Disquiet International and is a 2025 Key West Literary Seminar Fellow. Her work appears in 68 to 05, HerStry, The Broadkill Review, and elsewhere. Her two best friends are her randomly assigned college dorm mate and a big white poodle.
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Saliym Cooper
Saliym Cooper (he/him) is an orange soul who facilitates poetry workshops with foundations in black sonics and breathwork. He also creates on-the-spot-typewriter poetry. His poems, public speaking, and lessons from the trees have taught him to construct essays from an intuitive place, one that gives all humans the words to decipher their liberation.
Katelyn Durst Rivas
Katelyn Durst Rivas (she/they) is a poet, essayist, researcher, teaching artist, cultural organizer and mother who examines themes of Black girlhood, transracial adoption, motherhood, abolition and care for Black bodies through their creative work. In their cultural organizing and arts administrative work, Katelyn has worked in arts-based civic engagement, arts for community transformation, creative youth programming and media-based organizing for over 15 years. In 2019, she published the chapbook “Radical Self-Care for Black Women” and founded the Detroit chapter of The Free Black Women’s Library.
Qurrat ul ain Raza Abbas
Qurrat ul ain Raza Abbas (Q.) is a Pakistani writer and academic who writes from a cabin on a tomato farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her nonfiction and hybrid work explore shame, collective amnesia, and matrilineal histories. She is a 2025 VONA and Tin House Summer Fellow, and the recipient of the Melanie Hook Rice Award in Creative Nonfiction, with an honorable mention for the Andrew Claytor Poetry Prize. She is currently at work on an epistolary memoir tracing the partitioned women of her lineage, the spiritual legacy of Sufis, and her tender connection to the color Lal.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya Speculative Fiction Cohort
Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin
Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin (they/them) is a queer and trans, biracial, Vietnamese American diaspora writer whose work revolves around dreaming, fantasizing, and futurizing, and focuses on diaspora, transness, ecology, colonialism, capitalism, and intergenerational histories. Originally from the Bay Area, CA, they now live in Cambridge, MA. Kyla-Yến's work has appeared in The Offing, GASHER Journal, For Page & Screen Magazine, and more. They are a Member of the Reader Board at Sundress Publications and a Fiction Reader for Okay Donkey, and have been awarded residencies from the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), Collections of Transience, and The Hundredth Hill.
Dvita Kapadia
Dvita Kapadia (they/them) is a queer immigrant writer, neuroscientist and organizer, born in Mumbai and raised in Oman. Their work explores themes of intergenerational trauma and resilience, queer romance and being a survivor. When they are not writing or in the lab, they are snuggled on the couch with their cat, Aashi.
Jamie Moore
Jamie L. Moore (she/her) is a writer and scholar whose work centers storytelling in the Black feminist tradition. Jamie’s novella, Our Small Faces, was published by Doubleback Books and is available as an open source PDF. Her creative work can be found in Calyx Journal, Track/Four, The Nervous Breakdown, and TAYO Magazine, among others. Her doctoral work explores the care/work of Black and biracial women faculty in community colleges. Jamie reviews books on her Instagram @mixedreader.
Hien Nguyen
Hien Nguyen (she/her) is a Best of the Net nominated speculative fiction writer who writes about Vietnamese ghosts, monsters, and mythology. She is interested in the uplifting and haunting forms of human connection, and how writing speculative fiction can lay those bare. Hien’s work has been published by All Worlds Wayfarer, Fahmidan Journal, and others. She is a mentor for WriteGirl & Round Table Mentor, and a 2024 Roots. Wounds. Words. Writer’s Retreat Fellow. Hien’s debut young adult novel, Twin Tides, is forthcoming in December 9, 2025 from Delacorte Press (Random House Children's Books).
Gen Greer
Gen Greer (she/her) is lesbian writer working on a queer survivor-centered polyphonic re-write of Lolita from the perspective of Dolores Haze. She's currently working as a high school English teacher and coach in the Bay Area. When she's not teaching or attempting to write you can find her running, watching horror movies, and trying to get every dog she meets to fall in love with her.
Danielle Roberson
Danielle Roberson is a writer living in Texas. She is a 2025 Writers League of Texas Fellow. You can find her short fiction on her website: https://danielleroberson.carrd.co/.
Saoirse Laing
Saoirse Laing (she/her) is a writer haunted in the District of Columbia. There are rumors that she enjoys reading under moonlight and exploring places best left forgotten. She has a story forthcoming in Lilac Peril and can be found on Bluesky @saoirsecl.bsky.social.
Tanya Leah Young
Tanya Leah Young (she/her) is a Jamaican American writer from New York, now living in Charlotte, NC. A proud daughter of immigrants and a middle child, she’s been writing stories and poetry since childhood. In 2024, she was both a Hurston/Wright Speculative Fiction Fellow and a Roots.Wounds.Words Fiction Fellow. Her work celebrates resilience, identity, and ancestral wisdom as a path to healing generational trauma. Tanya Leah sees writing as a sacred thread connecting her to her ancestors. When not writing, she enjoys gardening, anime, trying new foods, and spending time with her pittbull, Brixtan Rose. IG: @_Leah_Hamilton, Bluesky: @leahhamilton.bsky.social
María Burgos Carradero
María M. Burgos Carradero is an editor and project manager who loves turning messy drafts into polished, impactful work. Born and raised in Humacao, Puerto Rico, she is the editor of CENTRO's Ricanwritings publications, a creative writing and personal development workshop facilitator and coordinates research projects at the Diaspora Solidarities Lab. With experience in academic outreach, collaborative publishing, and even poetry manuscript editing, María thrives where precision meets creativity. She holds an MA in English Literature from Michigan State University and a Bachelor in Molecular Biology from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. She is always up for a good book chat or an aqua aerobics session at the beach.
Emily del Carmen Ramirez
Emily del Carmen Ramirez is a queer Dominican American writer born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores themes of identity, familial tension, and cultural folklore. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.
Ayling Dominguez
Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, educator, and community artist who dreams and writes toward a borderless world with rematriated lands. What can language do for our resistance efforts? How can we use it to cultivate new worlds and weave our ancestors into the fabric of them? Ultimately, they believe in poetry as dutiful imagination and liberation practice. Their storytelling is rooted ancestrally in the lands of Puebla, México (Nahua) and the island of Kiskeya-Ayiti.
Naomi Scherelle Daugherty
Naomi Scherelle, she/they, is a living witness with Mississippi blood. She is a spirited healer, writer, educator, and alchemist from Chicago cultivating soft places for Black folks to land. Naomi aids folks in the practice of returning to the body and developing a personal relationship with the divine. In her work, she explores how our metaphysical homecoming expands the space and freedom dreaming we access in our present physical worlds. Naomi is the author of The Clearing: A black girl collecting her bones. On her substack, The Pleasure Archive, Naomi offers musings on the magnitude of feasting on pleasure.
Stephanie Macias
Short Fiction Cohort
Kyla Figueroa
Kyla Figueroa (she/her) is a writer from Stockton, CA. She received her B.A. in English, Creative Writing from Stanford University in June 2024. She was a 2022 Chappell Lougee Scholar, where she conducted research for her creative honors thesis in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her work focuses on coming-of-age, home/place, the environment, and alternative histories, with and without sci-fi elements. Her influences include Octavia Butler, Anthony Veasna So, Myriam Gurba, Jenny Zhang, and Carmen Maria Machado. You can find her watching YouTube video essays and making zines.
Christian Ivey
Christian M. Ivey (he/they), is a black nonbinary trans writer, editor, and art director from Pontiac, Michigan. Their work interrogates the mundane to illuminate how blackness is overdetermined by social death via kinships. They have edited issue NO. 28 themed on Belonging of FIYAH Literary Magazine and the forthcoming HEXAGON SF MYRIAD Zine themed on Kinship. Christian is also the Art Director for FIYAH, Associate Editor at Tenebrous Press’s Skull & Laurel, and the Digital Communications Specialist at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley.
Maria-Teresa Carmier
Maria-Teresa Carmier Villalobos is a recent Master of Design graduate from UC Berkeley and the founder of Unii Learning Labs, a design think tank developing community interventions, policy, and futures for children of color. As a multidisciplinary artist and speculative writer, her work explores Afro-magical futurism, horror, and decolonial mysticism. Through storytelling, installation, and pedagogy, she investigates memory, embodiment, and ancestral technology. A 2025 Abode Writers Workshop fellow, Maria-Teresa weaves together ritual and resistance to imagine liberatory worlds shaped by care, imagination, and survival. Her practice centers cultural regeneration and collective agency through creative, spiritual, and speculative design.
Lauren Cusimano
Lauren was in journalism before moving to Alaska to pursue a career in conservation—work that has directly inspired her writing. Lauren writes speculative fiction and horror short stories as well as nonfiction articles. Her writing can be seen in Juneau Empire to Phoenix New Times, among other publications. By day, Lauren is the Communications Manager for Audubon Alaska an is also a part-time instructor at the Cronkite School of Journalism. She lives on Dena’ina ełnena in Dgheyey Kaq’/Anchorage and enjoys cycling, birding, horror, doing Alaska stuff with her partner Nate, and singing to her pets, Fred Meyer and Leroy.
Farah Merchant
Farah Merchant is a creative based in Austin. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is the Digital Media Manager for the Criminal Justice Project at Texas Appleseed. Influenced by today's political landscape and her experiences as a South Asian American born and raised in Texas, her writing revolves around hypocritical human behavior, innate perseverance, and the grief of lack. She hopes her words build community, but is still learning to confront a blank page.
Germán Batiston
Germán Batiston is a writer who explores themes of identity, resilience, grief, and self-discovery through fiction. His work is known for the thoughtful use of symbols, metaphors, and unspoken emotions. He hopes for readers to question what it means to be human.
F.E. Choe
F.E. Choe is a Canadian and Korean-American writer whose work has been published in adda, Augur, Clarkesworld, Fractured Lit, and The Moth Magazine. She is a 2023 alum of the Clarion West and Viable Paradise workshops, and an Editor at 100 Word Story. Her work has received the support of Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, South Arts, the S.C. Arts Commission, and the Metropolitan Arts Council of Greenville, as well as been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. You can find her on Instagram @f.e.choe and online at www.fechoe.com.
Grace Gaynor
Grace Gaynor is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She is an assistant poetry editor for Noemi Press, an editorial intern at Electric Literature, and a poetry reader for Bicoastal Review. Her writing can be found in Salt Hill Journal, Lesbians are Miracles, and Wild Shrew Literary Review.
Melissa Calderón-Rougié
Melissa Calderón-Rougié is a Peruvian-American writer, mother, and creative born and raised in New York. Her writing has been published in the Acentos Review and Newtown Literary, among others. She is a Kenyon Review and Tin House online workshop alumna, and recently completed a digital residency with The Seventh Wave. Melissa is a recipient of the Johnson Scholarship from Queens College CUNY, where she will begin her MFA in poetry this upcoming fall. The eldest daughter of Peruvian immigrants, she lives in the world’s borough, Queens, with her husband, daughter, and son.
Kitzia Esteva
Kitzia Esteva is a Mexican migrant, gender non-binary, fiction writer, and poet. They are a social justice organizer engaged in cultural work, as imperative to sustaining and evolving social justice movements. They use storytelling as a place to shift narratives about queer/ trans, Indigenous, Black, migrant, and disabled people. Their documentary fiction contributes to our collective imagination of utopia and liberation while honoring the dignity, brilliance, and magic in marginalized communities. They have two essays published in the former Black Girl Dangerous online journal. Their short story, Mixe’s Feather, was recently published in the Acentos Review.