Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala is an Anishinaabe writer, beader, and Jingle Dress Dancer from White Earth Nation in Minnesota. She received her MFA from Arizona State University and was the 2024-25 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy. Her writing is published in the bestselling Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Passages North, CRAFT, and others. Blaeser-Wardzala is a 2022 Tin House Fellow and a 2021 Fellow for the inaugural Women’s National Book Association Authentic Voices Program. Her short fiction was a finalist for Best of the Net and nominated for a Pushcart. She is a Visiting Professor of Fiction at Ohio State University. Her novel and short story collection are forthcoming from Pantheon Books.
Visit her site at amberblaeserwardzala.wordpress.com
Hannah Bae
Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer who is at work on a memoir about healing from childhood trauma and family estrangement. In 2024, she was a New York State Council on the Arts grantee in literature and a juror in nonfiction for The Kirkus Prize. She was the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2022 and 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and a 2019 fellow at Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
She has been hired to teach creative writing for Indiana University’s Writers Conference, Kundiman, Kweli International Literary Festival, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and The Resort LIC. She has received residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, The Peter Bullough Foundation, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and The Sue-Je Lee Gage Sunlit Residency.
Her work is forthcoming or has been published in books including No Contact (Catapult, 2026), Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times (Red Hen Press, 2026) and Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing & Changing (Simon & Schuster, 2022).
Visit her site at www.hannahbae.com
Rita Woods
A writer of historical fantasy, Rita Woods is the award winning author of 3 novels. Her 1st novel, Remembrance was named one of the top Sci-Fi novels of 2020 by Essence, Vogue & Booklist as well as the recipient of the Hurston-Wright award for speculative fiction. Her 2nd novel, The Last Dreamwalker was one of 2023's Chicago Book of the Year. A graduate of Howard University Medical school, she currently serves as medical director of a men's maximum security prison. She lives in suburban Chicago with her family and loves coffee, travel, magic & cemetaries.
Visit her site at www.ritawoodswrites.com
Lynn Sloan
Lynn Sloan is a writer and photographer. She is the author of two novels, Midstream (2022) and Principles of Navigation (2015), and the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough (2018), all from Fomite Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares and Shenandoah, among other fine journals, and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. Fortune Cookies, featuring her flash fiction using fortune cookie fortunes, was produced as an art book by Lark Sparrow Press in 2022. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. For many years she taught photography in the MFA program of Columbia College Chicago, where she founded Occasional Readings in Photography and contributed to Afterimage, Art Week, and Exposure.
Visit her site at www.LynnSloan.com
Alex Poppe
Having lived in conflict zones such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine, Alex Poppe writes about fierce and funny women rebuilding their lives in the wake of violence. She is the author of four works of literary fiction: Duende, a 2024 American Legacy Book Awards winner, a 2023 International Book Awards winner, and a 2023 Readers’ Choice Book Awards finalist; Jinwar and Other Stories, a 2024 PenCraft Awards runner-up, a 2023 Readers’ Choice Book Awards winner, and a 2022 International Book Awards finalist; Moxie, and Girl, World, a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, and Eric Hoffer Grand Prize finalist. Breakfast Wine, her memoir-in-essay about her near decade working in northern Iraq, will be published on June 10, 2025. Most recently, Alex has worked in international development, awed by place, people, and their stories.
Visit her site at www.alexpoppe.com
Pedro Ponce
Pedro Ponce is the author of The Devil and the Dairy Princess (Indiana University Press, 2021) winner of the Don Belton Fiction Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. He is also the author of A Map of the Underground: Six Stories and a Flash Manifesto, part of the 2024 OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters Masters Series. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in BOMB, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Witness, and other journals. His work has also been featured in anthologies such as The Best Small Fictions 2019, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, and Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America. He has been recognized with a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and with residencies at Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He teaches writing and literary studies at St. Lawrence University.
Yoona Kim
Yoona is a Korean-American writer at work on her debut novel, Red Sun Bleed With Me, a magical realism & historical fiction adaptation of the Korean folktale about the nine-tailed fox.
Her work has been published in Poet Lore, The Rumpus, and Stylus. Her work has been supported by Ragdale and Tin House. She is a graduate of American University's Creative Writing MFA.
Visit her site at yoonawriter.com
Anne Burt
Anne Burt’s debut novel, The Dig, was a March 2023 American Booksellers' Association Indie Next pick and the Strand Bookstore's mystery selection of the month. She is coauthor, with Christina Baker Kline, of Please Don’t Lie, a psychological thriller forthcoming in September 2025. Anne is also the editor of My Father Married Your Mother: Dispatches from the Blended Family and coeditor of About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror. Her essays and fiction have appeared in numerous publications and venues, including Salon and National Public Radio; she is a past winner of Meridian Literary Magazine’s Editors’ Prize in Fiction. Anne graduated from Yale in 1989 with a BA in history, and from NYU in 1997 with an MFA in creative writing. She splits her time between New York City and Connecticut.
Visit her site at www.anneburtwriter.com
JP Solheim
JP Solheim is a fiction writer, teacher, and literary critic. The author of The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2018), their fiction and essays have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, MQR: Mixtape, Midwest Weird Audio Literary Magazine, The Pinch, and Poets & Writers. They were also bassist, singer, and songwriter in several Chicago indie punk bands. They hold a PhD in French from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Writing and Literature (fiction) from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and have taught at the University of Michigan, Université de Paris VII, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as writing centers across the United States. They serve as the Associate Director of the BookEnds novel revision fellowship at The Lichtenstein Center of Stony Brook University.
Visit their site at www.jennifersolheim.com
Sarah Wang
Sarah Wang teaches writing at Barnard College. She is a MacDowell Fellow, a NYSCA/NYFA Nonfiction Fellow, a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, a Center for Fiction Fellow, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a Kenyon Review Workshop Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, and the winner of a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. Her writing appears in The New Yorker; The Atlantic; London Review of Books; The Nation; The New Republic; Harper's Bazaar; n+1; BOMB; and McSweeney's. New Skin, her debut novel, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2026.
Visit her site at wangsarah.com
Kristin Tenor
Kristin Tenor finds inspiration in life's quiet details and believes in their power to illuminate the extraordinary. She is the author of the flash fiction chapbook This Is How They Mourn (Thirty West Publishing House, 2024), which explores the liminal spaces that exist between unexpected loss and what remains. Her fiction has appeared in Best Microfiction 2024, Wigleaf, Bending Genres, 100 Word Story, and various other literary journals and anthologies. Kristin's work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize, as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. She currently serves as the Managing Editor at Story.
Visit her site at kristintenor.com
Ayako Kato
Described as “moving everyday sculptures, artfully cast in naturalness” (Luzerner Zeitung, Switzerland), Ayako Kato, a kinetic philosopher/poet and 2023 United States Artist Fellow, is a contemporary experimental choreographer/dancer/improviser originally from Yokohama, Japan. Since 1998, Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape has been in deep collaboration with over 100 musicians and composers, presenting in Europe, Asia, and the US. Advocating the principles of fūryū, Japanese for “wind flow,” cyclical transformation and motion in nature, Ayako creates solo, ensemble pieces, and movement installations for traditional stages and large scale site-specific locations. In 2025, Ayako toured Japan and Taiwan as Suzuribako music and dance ensemble and also presented ETHOS: Ways of the Wind in collaboration with the University of Colorado Colorado Springs through the Heller Fellowship Award. In 2024, she presented ETHOS IV: Degrowth/Cycle Rebirth at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago Spotlight Festival and the Grant Park in collaboration with Chicago Park District's Night Out in the Parks, being supported by the Sybil Shearer Fellowship at Ragdale 2024, a 2023 National Dance Project (NDP) Grant Finalist Award, and A. Montgomery Ward Foundation. In early December 2024, Ayako performed as a part of the Black Air exhibition curated by Amelia LiCavoli at the Casino Luxembourg Forum d'art contemporain. In addition to classical ballet and modern dance, she also studied Tai Chi, Noh Theater, and Butoh with master Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders, and dance anatomy under Irene Dowd.
Find her at ayakokatodance.com
Oliver Caplan
Award-winning American composer Oliver Caplan offers a voice of hope in an uncertain world. Inspired by the resiliency of the human spirit and beauty of the natural world, his music celebrates stories of social justice, conservation and community.
From Kearney, Nebraska to Carnegie Hall, Oliver’s music has been performed by over 75 ensembles in the United States and around the globe. He has been commissioned by the American Wild Ensemble, Atlanta Chamber Players, Bella Piano Trio, Bronx Arts Ensemble, Brookline Symphony Orchestra, Columbia University Wind Ensemble and New Hampshire Master Chorale, among others. Winner of a Special Citation for the American Prize in Orchestral Composition and the Oratorio Society of New York’s 150th Anniversary Competition, additional recognitions include two Veridian Symphony Competition Wins, the Fifth House Ensemble Competition Grand Prize and fellowships at Ragdale, Millay Arts and VCCA. His vocal works include settings of poetry by Maya Angelou, Richard Blanco, Hannah Fries and Meghan Guidry. Oliver’s music is featured on seven albums and has been streamed over a half million times.
A leader in the field of contemporary classical music, Oliver is the Artistic Director of the American Prize-winning Juventas New Music Ensemble, the only professional ensemble of its kind devoted specifically to the music of emerging composers. He also serves on the Ragdale Foundation’s Curatorial Board and is a voting member of the Recording Academy.
Oliver holds degrees from Dartmouth College and the Boston Conservatory. He resides in Medford, Massachusetts with his husband Chris and corgi Simon.
Visit his site at
Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang’s most recent novel, The Family Chao, won an Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of her first collection, Hunger: A Novella and Stories, was recently published by W.W. Norton & Company. She is also the author of All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, which won the PEN Open Book Award. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2024, she received an Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She directs the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Visit her site at www.lansamanthachang.com
Guillermo Delgado
Guillermo Delgado teaches courses in art, poetry, community engagement, and contemplative practices like yoga, meditation, and walking. In 2014, he began facilitating creative workshops in men’s correctional facilities, including the juvenile detention center in Lansing. In addition to completing a yoga teacher training program, he is trained in prison and trauma-informed yoga through The Prison Yoga Project.
As an interdisciplinary artist and educator, he strives to create safe, accessible, and mindful learning opportunities everywhere. Recently, he has embarked on a quest to reclaim his maternal language and to dream in Spanish again by reading and writing poetry in Spanish and learning to play Son Jarocho music, a regional folk musical style of Mexican Son from Veracruz.
A very long time ago…
He was a magician, deejay for hire, and bicycle messenger in Chicago.
"I'm not saying art will save you, but as humans, we need hope to survive and thrive," Delgado says. "Art is hope. And hope allows us to imagine something better for ourselves and the world, and art builds bridges between us all."
Frances de Pontes Peebles
Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of the novels The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe. Her books have been translated into ten languages. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a Creative Writing Fellow in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, and has received a Fulbright grant and Brazil’s Sacatar Fellowship. In 2019, she served as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, and Guernica. Her novel, The Seamstress, was adapted for film and mini-series on Brazil’s Globo Network. She is proud to serve as Board Chair of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, and on the steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action Illinois.
Visit her site at francespeebles.com
Robin Ha
Robin Ha (She/her) is a Korean American cartoonist based in Virginia. She is the author and the illustrator of Almost American Girl, a 2020 Harvey Award nominee and 2021 Walter Award honoree memoir, and Cook Korean!: A Comic Book With Recipes, a New York Times bestselling cookbook graphic novel. Her comics and illustrations have appeared in various publications including The Washington Post, and LA Times, as well as in anthologies highlighting Asian American culture including RISE: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now, New Frontiers: The Many Worlds of George Takei, and Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology (Secret Identities).
Robin grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to the United States at age fourteen. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, she moved to New York City and worked in the fashion industry for several years before diving into comics. Robin has been an avid reader of comics since she was introduced to them by her mother as a young girl. She strives to make comics that are entertaining and also empower the readers to become more accepting of themselves and others. Robin is currently working on her third graphic novel inspired by the Korean folklore of Gumiho.
Visit her at robinha81.wixsite.com/robinha
Roberto Jamora
Roberto Jamora is a Richmond-based artist and educator. He holds an MFA from the State University of New York at Purchase and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCUarts). He is an Assistant Professor at the VCUarts Art Foundation Program.
Roberto is working on a series of abstract paintings titled “An Inventory of Traces” which explores how color triggers memory.
He is the Asian Centennial Distinguished Fine Arts Fellow at William & Mary. He has participated in Artist-in-Residence programs at the Cow House Studios, Arte Studio Ginestrelle, Jentel, VCCA-France Moulin à Nef, Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, Ragdale, and Sambalikhaan.
His artwork has been exhibited at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, Cody Gallery at Marymount University, SFA Projects, Antenna, FLXST Contemporary, Bond Millen Gallery (formerly Page Bond Gallery), Philippine Consulate in New York, ADA Gallery, Topaz Arts, Norte Maar, Shockoe Artspace, JuiceBox Art Space, Good Enough Projects, Quality Gallery, Scott Charmin Gallery, Fouladi Projects, the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, Open Space, Outlet Fine Art, ArtHelix, and Ishmael Bernal Gallery.
He is represented by Bond Millen Gallery in Richmond. His artwork is in collections including the Atlanta Hawks NBA Team, Capital One, CoStar Group, Friedlander Misler, Harvard Kennedy School, Muscarelle Museum of Art at William & Mary, Orrick, and several private collections throughout North America, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom.
Visit his site at robertojamora.com
Jac Jemc
Jac Jemc teaches creative writing at UC San Diego and serves as faculty director of the Clarion Writers' Workshop. She is the author of five books of fiction, most recently Empty Theatre and False Bingo. She was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a recent finalist for the California Book Award.
Visit her site at jacjemc.com
Tekki Lomnicki
Tekki Lomnicki is the founder and Artistic Director of Tellin’ Tales Theatre,
a 29-year old company dedicated to shattering the barriers between the disabled and non-disabled worlds through the power of personal story. Tekki’s two full-length plays When Heck Was a Puppy: The Living Testimonies of Folk Artist Edna Mae Brice and Blurred Vision were critically acclaimed. She has written and performed over 28 solo performance pieces, and starred in the award-winning film, The Miracle by Jeffrey Jon Smith. She taught youth at Chicago’s Gallery 37 and After School Matters, Victory Gardens Training Center, Disability Lead and Shirley Ryan Ability Lab. She is a recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowships, the 2010 Grigsby Award for Excellence in Solo Performance, the 2014 Dan Van Hecke Award for outstanding leadership and service to the disability community. Tekki is a DEI professional and does disability awareness presentations for corporations.