Dr. Jenna Butler (she/her) is a queer BIPOC poet, essayist, and editor. She serves as a series editor for CrowSaid Poetry and acquiring editor for Barbour Books, both imprints of NeWest Press, and is the Poetry Editor for ARC magazine. Butler is the author of six collections of poetry and essays. Revery: A Year of Bees, essays about beekeeping, climate grief, and trauma recovery, was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award and a longlisted title for CBC Canada Reads in 2023. Butler writes and works on the land between a collaborative off-grid organic farm in northern Treaty 6, Alberta, and a small flower farm on the unceded traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples of southern Vancouver Island.

Dr. Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer, Jonny Appleseed, Making Love with the Land, and Indigiqueerness: a Conversation About Storytelling as well as the editor of Love after the End: an Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. Whitehead is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary (Treaty 7) where he is housed in the departments of English and International Indigenous Studies.

Jamaican-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson, born in 1960, was the recipient of the 1997 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring. She has published six novels, numerous short stories, and has written comics in DC's "Sandman" universe. She has received the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award, the John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, Canada's Aurora Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Award. In 2020, Science Fiction Writers Association made her its 37th Damon Knight Memorial "Grand Master," a lifetime achievement award in recognition of her writing, teaching, and mentorship. She lives in Vancouver, BC, where she is a professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her 2024 novel, Blackheart Man, was also a Sunburst Award winner.

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 2020) is her first all prose collection. She is the author of the Marvel novel adaptation of the legendary comics, Black Panther: Panther's Rage (Titan Books, October 2022). She is also the author of two multigenre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press July 2016), longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review and Shotgun Lullabies (Aqueduct January 2011). She edited the World Fantasy-winning groundbreaking black speculative fiction anthologies, Dark Matter (2000 and 2004) and is the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction short stories.  Her work is widely anthologized and appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage, 2020). She is the Associate Editor of the historic Black arts literary journal, Obsidian: Literature & the Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975 and is the Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949. She also writes book reviews for Asimov's. She was recently honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist in the Special Award – Professional category for contributions to the genre and is the Co-Host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony at Discon III in Washington, DC with Malka Older. Sheree is the Guest of Honor of Wiscon 45 and a Special Guest of Boskone 58. She is a Marvel writer and contributor to the groundbreaking anthology, Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda edited by Jesse J. Holland. She lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.

Kaneza Schaal (New York, NY) works in theater, opera and film. Her work has shown in divergent contexts from NYC galleries, to courtyards in Vietnam, to East African amphitheaters, to European opera houses, to USA public housing, to rural auditoriums in the UAE. By creating art that speaks many formal, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and experiential languages she seeks expansive audiences. Schaal received a 2025 Doris Duke Artist Award, 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public Space Fellowship, Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, and she directed the 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Omar. Schaal is an Arts-in-Education advocate, most recently she taught a course on theater and social practice at Harvard University and served as the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre at Fordham University. In her commitment to artist centered institutions, Schaal co-founded Gahinga Institute for Contemporary Art in Kigali Rwanda; served on the board of PS122/PSNY; Leadership Council for Creatives Rebuilt New York artists employment and guaranteed income initiative; Artistic Leadership Committee for New Victory Theater; and she is currently a co-Director of Under The Radar Festival, NYC.

Yasmine Seale is a poet, critic and literary translator. Her essays on literature, art, history and film have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Apollo and elsewhere. Her translations from the Arabic include The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021), described by The New Yorker as “an electric new translation” and by The Economist as “quietly momentous”. She has also published Aladdin, a translation of the classic folktale (W. W. Norton, 2018), Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi, a collaboration with Robin Moger (Tenement Press, 2022), and Something Evergreen Called Life, a translated collection of poems by the Sudanese writer Rania Mamoun (Action Books, 2023). A contributing editor at Bidoun magazine, she is the recipient of the 2020 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, and of grants and fellowships from PEN America, Koç University in Istanbul, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. A former fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, she is currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University.