Kai Coggin is the author of three full-length poetry
collections PERISCOPE HEART (Swimming with Elephants 2014), WINGSPAN
(Golden Dragonfly Press 2016), and INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press
2019), as well as a spoken word album SILHOUETTE (2017). She is a queer
woman of color who thinks Black lives matter, a teaching artist in poetry with
the Arkansas Arts Council, and the host of the longest running consecutive
weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently named
“Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful
poetry has been nominated three times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as
Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems
have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Weekly, Entropy, NELLE,
Sinister Wisdom, Calamus Journal, Lavender Review, Luna Luna, Blue Heron
Review, Yes, Poetry and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The
Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the
valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian-Americana, and author of
nine full-length books of poetry, with Some Glad Morning coming out in
the Pitt Poetry Series in 2019. Her awards include the WB Yeats Society of New
York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work appears
in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including The Valparaiso
Poetry Review, The Chariton Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Tar River
Poetry Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Hollins Critic, The Denver
Quarterly, Smartish Pace, Gargoyle, Christianity and Literature, The American
Poetry Journal, Dogwood, Zone 3, Passages North, Nimrod, Common Wealth:
Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, The Bedford Introduction to Literature
Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and has been
read on the ABC, the BBC, The Writer’s Almanac, and featured on Ted
Kooser's American Life in Poetry.
Andrew Geyer’s ninth book, the story cycle Lesser Mountains (Lamar
University Press, 2019), won a 2020 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for
U.S. South - Best Regional Fiction. His other individually authored books are Dixie
Fish, a novel; Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin, a story cycle; Meeting
the Dead, a novel; and Whispers in Dust and Bone, a story cycle that
won the silver medal for short fiction in the Foreword Magazine Book of the
Year Awards and a Spur Award for short fiction from the Western Writers of
America. He is the co-author, with Jerry Craven and Terry Dalrymple, of the
hybrid story cycle Dancing on Barbed Wire. Geyer also co-authored Parallel
Hours, an alternative history/sci fi novel; and Texas 5X5, another
hybrid story cycle from which one of his stories won a second Spur Award for
short fiction. He co-edited the composite anthology A Shared Voice with Tom
Mack. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the South Carolina
Academy of Authors Literary Hall of Fame, Geyer currently serves as English
Department Chair at the University of South Carolina Aiken and Fiction Editor
for Concho River Review.
Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of nine poetry books, three textbooks, three children's
books, editor of eight anthologies, and coauthor of a book of pedagogy. He is a
Fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, an adjunct professor for Oklahoma
State University – Tulsa, and Curriculum Auditor for Tulsa Public Schools. He
is a former faculty member of both the Writing Program of the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago and the Drama Division of The Juilliard School. Lansana
served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and
Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2011, where he was also
Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing until 2014. Lansana is
currently a Contributing Editor for Oklahoma Today magazine, and served
as the Poetry Section Editor for Black Issues Book Review, as well as a
Reading/Language Arts Editor for three of the largest educational publishing
companies in the nation. He also worked as a Special Program Editor for Chicago
Public Radio’s Every Other Hour series InVerse. Lansana was also an
Assignment Desk Assistant for KWTV-9 in Oklahoma City and a News Director for
KGOU Radio in Norman. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy
& Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff)
was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was a
2012 NAACP Image Award nominee. His most recent books include the skin of
dreams: new & collected poems, 1995-2018 (The Calliope Group, LLC); The
Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent,
w/Georgia A. Popoff (Haymarket Books, 2017); Revise the Psalm: Work
Celebrating the Writings of Gwendolyn Brooks w/Sandra Jackson-Opoku
(Curbside Splendor, 2017); A Gift from Greensboro (Penny Candy Books,
2016); The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop
w/Kevin Coval and Nate Marshall (Haymarket Books, 2015) and The Walmart
Republic w/ Christopher Stewart (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014).
Poet Tiffany Midge is the
author of Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s, (Nebraska UP, 2019), a
collection of life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in today’s America.
Other books include Guiding the Stars to Their Campfire, Driving the
Salmon to Their Beds (Gazoobi Tales); the full-length poetry collection Outlaws,
Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review
Press, 1996), winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award; the
collection, The Woman Who Married a Bear (The University of New Mexico
Press, 2016), winner of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous
Poetry; and the children's book Animal Lore and Legend: Buffalo (Scholastic,
1995). Midge's work has appeared in North American Review, World Literature
Today, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah,
Poetry Northwest and the online journals No Tell Motel and Drunken
Boat. She earned an MFA from the University of Idaho, and an enrolled
member of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. She is of Hunkpapa Sioux and
German ancestry, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where she lives now.
Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough
Press, 2014) and the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His poetry,
fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in
journals such as Salamander, RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage,
Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer,
Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, and elsewhere. Reviews of his
work can be found at CutBank Literary Journal, Concho River Review,
San Antonio Express-News, American Microreviews & Interviews, Southwestern
American Literature, Pleiades, and others. You can check out his Frontextos
(visual poems) in Gold Wake Live, Newfound, Chachalaca Review, Chair Poetry
Evenings, Red Wedge, The Museum of Americana, About Place Journal, The American
Journal of Poetry, The Windward Review, Tapestry, and Twisted Vine
Literary Arts Journal. His visual work has been exhibited at Presa House
Gallery, AllState Almaguer art space in Mission, TX, the Weslaco Museum, Our
Lady of the Lake University, El Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, and at
the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater. An
exhibit of work is forthcoming at The Southwest School of Art in San Antonio,
TX. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and is the regional
editor for Texas Books in Review and poetry editor for The Journal of
Latina Critical Feminism. Octavio teaches Literature and Creative Writing
in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio,
Texas. Check out his website: octavioquintanilla.com or find him on Instagram
@writeroctavioquintanilla & Twitter @OctQuintanilla
