Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D. Louisiana Poet Laureate (2021-2023), is an author, folklorist, Louisiana Folklife Commissioner, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina; currently Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English at Dillard University; poetry books: Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Second Line Home, celebrates New Orleans Black Creole culture.

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of innovative poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams award from the Poetry Society of America.

Chicago’s Inaugural Poet Laureate, interdisciplinary artist avery r. young is also an award-winning teaching artist.

Kate Baldwin is a scholar and teacher who specializes in comparative literary and cultural histories. Her first book, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, remaps black American modernism by addressing the involvement of African-American intellectuals with Soviet communism and a Russian intellectual heritage.