Born in Houston, poet, writer, scholar, and editor Raneem Bakir Alia was raised in Texas, but lived abroad during her adolescence. Raneem Bakir Alia is a Moroccan-Palestinian American whose research is centered on North African and Middle Eastern history, liberation and anti-colonial movements analyzed through a gendered lens. Her writing, informed by her research, explores grief, family, girlhood, and the things we inherit through our matrilineage willingly or otherwise. 

In 2020, Bakir Alia was awarded a Mellon Research Scholar Fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in which she was awarded a grant to continue her research on revolution, liberation, and a gendered view of identity formation in the Moroccan Liberation Movement. She is formerly a poetry and prose editor at Glass Mountain Magazine, the Undergraduate Literary Magazine at the University of Houston. 

Lupe Mendez (writer/educator/activist) is the author of Why I Am Like Tequila (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Mendez is one of the founders of the Librotraficante Movement and of Tintero Projects, a Texas-based organization that works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub.

Mendez earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at El Paso. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, the Texas Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Split This Rock, Poetry magazine, and Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, among others. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Macondo, and the Crescendo Literary/Poetry Foundation poetry incubator. Mendez is the 2022–2023 Texas poet laureate. He lives in Houston, where he has worked as an educator for the last 22 years. 

Kaitlin Rizzo is a writer, researcher, and translator working on a series of projects related to the life of Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. Last year, she was a Finalist for the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. Her writing can be found forthcoming in Plume and the anthology Shreela Ray: On the Life and Work of an American Master, published by Pleiades, Copper Nickel, and Gulf Coast presses. She lives and teaches in Houston, where she is a Co-President and Founder of the Adjunct English Society, which advocates for sustainable wages for contingent faculty at the University of Houston. 

Jeremy Eugene is a poet and educator currently teaching high school English. He is of Trinidadian heritage and resides in Houston. He is a two-time member of the nationally-acclaimed Houston VIP Poetry Slam team. His work has appeared in The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies and is forthcoming in Carceral Liberalism. He hopes to inspire and motivate social change with all of his work.