c.r.glasgow (doc, Dr. g) is a multihyphenated human & a member of the coastal elite – rooted in Trinidad & Haiti, raised in the Forgotten Borough, nourished in Chicago & living in the Pacific Northwest. Cross-discipline, poetry is the essence. Each layer of landscape has offered a palette thirsty for creative confluences & comfort with exile. Their storytelling & transformative healing expands fixed ideas of embodiment, time & place through the observation of Black diasporic cultures. Their chapbook the Devils that raised Us was longlisted by Frontier Poetry. c received a 2023 Best of the Net nomination in poetry from Torch Literary. They have been the offered the Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from Sewanee in 2024 & in 2025 an alternate for the Katherine Bakeless Nason Participant Scholarship. Recent work can be found in the 2024 Emerge Anthology, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Black Lawrence Press, Lion’s Roar & Callaloo.

Photo credit: Michael B. Maine

Felix Eshiet is a Nigerian writer and Efik-Ibibio poet. He's a Best of the Net nominee whose works appear or are forthcoming in Chestnut Review, ONLY POEMS, Madrid Review, Porter House, African Writer Magazine, 20.35 Africa, Afritondo, Kalahari Review, Olumo, Afrihill Press, and elsewhere. Felix is a managing editor at Ekondo Review; a literary magazine for Efik-Ibibio arts and literature. He was longlisted for the Wale Okediran National Poetry Prize, 2025, and his debut poetry chapbook, "Never Look a God in the Eye," is set for publication in 2026.

Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri (he/him) is a Black poet and prose writer from Ghana. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and BREW Poetry Award nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, Colorado Review, Chestnut Review, The Malahat Review, Consilience Journal, A Long House, Minyan Magazine, Protean Magazine, The Poetry Lighthouse, NENTA Literary Journal, Lotus-Eater Magazine, Poem Stellium, Flash Fiction Magazine, Twin Flame Literary, and elsewhere. He is the first-place winner of the 8th African Writers Award (Poetry), first-place winner of the 2025 Wingless Dreamer Contest, a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize, and the fourth runner-up for the African Literary Prize. He was also recently longlisted for the Renard Press Poetry Prize.

Nyachiro Lydia Kasese is a Tanzanian creative writer, poet, documentarian and media director. In 2014, her short story Inside Outside was long-listed and published in CACE Africa's Anthology Fire In The Night (2014). In that same year, her poem Things That Were Lost in Our Vaginas was short-listed by the BN poetry award 2014. In 2015, a short poetry collection The Science of Nail Polish was published by Jalada Africa, 2015. In 2016, Paper Dolls, poetry chapbook Published in May by the African Poetry Book Fund. In 2017, Short story, My Mother’s Project published in The Caine Prize’s anthology in June 2017. Poem, Silver Spoons published in 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2018). In 2019, her short story Home was published in the Unbreakable Bonds Anthology. Poems, I Lost My Teeth in a Fight, C.A.G, Compass, Forced Dreams, Self-Negotiation, published in An Anthology of East African Literature (2023). In 2025, her short collection Vumilia & Other Poems was published by Lolwe and has the poems Vumilia (Bear With It), Homesick, The Color Red, Hide and Seek, and The Cliffs.

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Marlanda Dekine is a poet from Georgetown, South Carolina, and the author of Thresh & Hold,
winner of the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize from Hub City Press and praised by The New
York Times as a “stirring debut.” She currently serves as the first Poet Laureate of Georgetown
County Libraries.

Dekine has received a South Carolina Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in Spoken
Word and Slam Poetry. Her work has been celebrated internationally, including recognition in Gramophone UK for her “intimate and epic perspectives” on American identity in the chamber ensemble performance of Ars Poetica, composed by Douglas Boyce.

A celebrated spoken word poet and cultural strategist, Dekine is the founder of Speaking Down
Barriers, a nonprofit dedicated to equity and justice, and Dekine Cultural Strategies LLC, a consulting practice that supports communities and organizations through creativity, dialogue, and cultural work. Her poems have appeared in Orion, Poetry, Callaloo, Oxford American, and other publications, and are included in several anthologies, including This Is the Honey, What Things Cost, and Ecological Solidarities.

Dekine holds degrees from Furman University (B.A., Psychology), the University of South Carolina (M.S.W.), and Converse University (M.F.A.).

I am a Caribbean writer and poet from St. Kitts and Nevis, and much of my work begins with memory, place, and the life I have lived on a small island that shaped me in many ways. I write about motherhood, resilience, faith, and the quiet moments that carry more meaning than people often notice. My poetry is influenced by the sea I grew up nearby, the voices of my family, and the experiences that taught me how strength and softness can exist together.

I am the working on creating a publishing company, Caribbean Scribbles Publishing and being a children’s book author of children’s and adult books author and poet. I believe deeply in stories that reflect our culture and our everyday lives, especially for young readers who deserve to see themselves on the page. My creative work also includes community learning, digital storytelling, and projects that support education and empowerment across the Caribbean.

I am building my craft with intention and care and I am committed to growing as a poet. Being part of the 2025 Obsidian Foundation Retreat is an important step for me and I look forward to learning, writing, and contributing to a community of writers who understand the power of our stories.

Sim Pereira-Madder is an emerging poet of mixed British/Brazilian heritage born and based in London. He is an alum of the Obsidian Foundation and of the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective, an MA candidate at Poetry School, and a reader for The London Magazine. Among other places his work appears or is forthcoming in Magma, Poetry London, and The Poetry Review.

Photo credit: Ray Roberts

Sasa Aakil is an interdisciplinary Artist, Writer living and working in the DC area. She is a ceramic artist, painter, poet, print maker, and bassist and served as the 2021 Montgomery County Youth Poet Laureate. Sasa has been featured in the Bethesda Magazine for her work as Youth Poet Laureate. She has also been featured in the Washington Post, as well as on WTOP. She has shown sculptural and two-dimensional work at the American Poetry Museum and Black Rock Art Center. Sasa is the founder of If All the Trees Were Pens Open Mic and recently published her first chapbook, the culmination of all my despair and the music that saves me. She has been published in Pensive Journal, Split This Rocks The Quarry, and more as well as co-editiing Bright Before Us, Like A Flame (Shout Mouse Press) and If All the Trees Were Pens Vol. 1. She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Howard University in 2024.

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Christian M. Ivey (he/they) is a black nonbinary writer, editor, and art director from Pontiac, Michigan. Their work interrogates the mundane to illuminate how blackness is overdetermined by social death via kinships. They are the Digital Communications Specialist for the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, and Co-Fiction & Art Editor for Anathema Magazine: Spec from the Margins. His works has been supported by Hurston/Wright Foundations for Black Writers, Voodoonauts, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Under the Volcano, PREE Studio, The Obsidian Foundation, The Watering Hole, Tin House, and more. They have guest edited at issue NO. 28 of Hugo Award Winning FIYAH Literary Magazine and HEXAGON SF MYRIAD zine themed on kinship. Christian has writings in or forthcoming Baffling Magazine, beestung magazine, Black Youth Project, and Cosmic Horror Monthly.

Merrie Joy Williams is a profoundly neurodivergent poet, novelist, essayist, editor and Creative Writing tutor, who lives in London, and is an inaugural recipient of The Black Writers’ Guild’s Mary Prince Award. She has been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, and is a winner and judge of the Poetry Archive’s ‘PAN’ competition; as well as the recipient of a London Writers’ Award, Arts Council England Awards for poetry and prose, and a Hawthornden fellowship. Residencies have included Manchester Poetry Library, Historic England, and Applause Rural Touring/The South Downs National Park.

Her debut collection is ‘Open Windows’, of which Magma Poetry wrote: ‘She is clearly good at her craft. Her writing is assured, driven by sonorous language’. Merrie’s poems have been published in Poetry Wales, Pree Lit, Tentacular, The Good Journal, the ‘After Sylvia’ anthology (Nine Arches) and elsewhere. She is a particular enthusiast of the short story for which she loves its poetic concision, and scope to juxtapose the unusual and quotidian in profound ways. She is a passionate growing artist and strums the guitar badly, because she loves to sing.

Photo credit: Willa Ferrer

Shakeema Edwards is an Antiguan American writer living in the U.K. She holds a master’s in poetry from Queen’s University Belfast, where she studied as the recipient of the Seamus Heaney International Poetry Scholarship. Her work has appeared in journals such as Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Propel, and Channel, and she was shortlisted for the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize.

Recipe for Leaving, her debut pamphlet with Green Bottle Press, foregrounds immigration, matrilineal heritage, nature, and loss.

vangile gantsho is a poet, healer, teaching artist and co-founder of impepho press. she is the current editor of New Coin Poetry Journal and the author of poetry collections red cotton (2018) and Undressing in Front of the Window (2015). she holds an MA in creative writing from the University Currently Known as Rhodes and has taught at several tertiary institutions in South Africa and the USA. her work appears in various publications including small fisted poems (forthcoming 2025), The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning (2024), Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems (2021), New Daughters of Africa (2019), The Atlanta Review (2018) and Illuminations (2017). gantsho has performed her work on three continents and curated and co-curated literary events across the globe, both in-person and online. she is dedicated to initiatives that encourage black feminine visibility and healing, such as Ukuthula, a creative writing resistance to gender-based violence, and smallgirl rising connecting the Divine Black Feminine, an international poetry healing initiative.

Photo credit: Seth Avusuglo

Shannon Smith-Meekings is a Queer identifying, North-East London born Jamaican and English poet, who graduated from Goldsmiths University in 2022. Her first published work of five poems appears in the 2023 spring edition of ‘The Poetry Review’ including titles such as ‘If asked to write an elegy’ and ‘Gyalist’. Followed by the magazine's autumn 2024 issue which Shannon’s subsequent work has appeared in the 15th issue of ‘Propel Magazine’, the ‘Present Tense’ Zine and ‘Basket Magazine’. Headlining events for The Poetry Review, Tank Magazine, The Queer Poetry Collective, Present Tense and The Sober Poetry Club, Shannon currently hosts a monthly poem share in Newington Green, in partnership with Present Tense. The themes of Shannon’s work centre around the implications of loss of ancestral connection to culture and grief as inheritance. Additionally Shannon’s work explores queerness and community in its reliance on connection to qualify identity as a queer poet.

Iyanuoluwa Adenle is a writer living in Lagos, Nigeria. She is curious about the physical and non-physical spaces we occupy and how we navigate our individual and collective realities with language as a witness. Her practice is nostalgia-driven and research-based, as she is investigating the in-betweenness of the body, the unreliable nature of memory and the politics of place. Her writings have appeared in The Poetry Review, Chestnut Review, Banshee Lit, Lolwe, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. Adenle is a 2024 Lantern Art Space Fellow, 2024 Ubwali Masterclass Participant, and the winner of the 2024 Kofi Awoonor Poetry Prize. In 2025, she was selected for the Tender Visions Commissioning Project.

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Angel Patricks Amegbe is a writer, poet, and visual storyteller whose work explores identity, mental health, faith, and belonging. As a multidisciplinary creative, she approaches storytelling as both personal expression and communal practice.

Community-making is central to her work. She curates Taruwa, a gathering where diasporas connect through storytelling and creative expression, and founded Poetry and Tea, a safe space for wellbeing and collective creativity. She is the author of two novels, The Days of Silence (Masobe, 2021) and No Pink in a Rainbow (Masobe, 2024)—shortlisted for the CANEX Prize for Publishing in Africa—as well as a poetry collection, SUNDANCE (2023).

Through her writing and the spaces she curates, Angel continues to explore art’s capacity to hold contradiction, spark dialogue, and create openings for healing.

Born in Kano and raised in Abuja, Nigeria, she now lives in Belgium with her family, continually making and remaking home between geographies, languages, and roles.

Christian Emecheta is a Nigerian writer and self-awareness advocate. Two-time shortlisted for the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize and a recipient of the BAOBAB Award (2019), he was also longlisted for the Joe Ushie Literature Foundation Award 2026. He served as a volunteer editor for the Poets In Nigeria @10 Anthology (2025).

His fiction and poetry have been featured in numerous publications, including Arts Lounge Magazine, Step Away Magazine, The Decolonial Passage, PSYCHOPOMP, Nalubaale Review, The Shallow Tales Review, After Dinner Conversation Magazine, Pure Slush, Balagan Magazine, New Feathers Anthology, Exquisite Death Ezine, Micromance Magazine, Humourme Magazine, SHINE Magazine, Flame Tree Publishing, Cranked Anvil Press, Walden's Poetry and Reviews, and Mocking Owl Roost, Superpresent Magazine, 9th Chinua Achebe Poetry/Essay Anthology (2024) to name a few.

His work is also forthcoming in Brussels Review, Rattle Magazine, Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO), and from Palm Branch Publishing. Christian finds inspiration through reading, film, and the boundless landscapes of his imagination.

Gloria Kiconco is a poet, essayist, and zine-maker based in Kampala, Uganda. She has published with PREE Lit Magazine, Transition Magazine and The Weganda Review. Her poems appear in 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2018) and Dear Nev: An Anthology of East African Writers. Her personal essays can be found on Adda and More of Us.

Gloria was one of the inaugural Writers-in-Residence (2019) with Goethe Institut Burkina Faso and a poet-in-residence with the Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University in Jan/Feb 2023. Her poetry zines include SOLD OUT (2016), RETURN TO SENDER (2018), You Are Lost, You Are Here X (2020), Tunnel of Delight (2021), Cardinal Directions (2024), and Negative Space (2025).

Denise R. Ervin is a creative writer hewn from the streets, classrooms, and boardrooms of Detroit, all of which taught her to contribute to the narrative of those who live, love, and look like her. She has spent more than two decades as a teaching artist, performing poetry around the country, and leading workshops for the likes of Midnight & Indigo, Literary Cleveland, and the University of Michigan. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Vagabond City Lit, Harbinger Asylum, Third Wednesday Magazine, and others. While serving as Literary Arts Director for Sundress Academy for the Arts, she was selected as a Graduate Fellow by The Watering Hole and a semifinalist for America’s Next Great Author. When not working on her first full-length poetry manuscript (tentatively titled Palimpsest) or one of her novel projects, Denise serves as a Program Manager for a local non-profit dedicated to youth writing and literacy.

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Ifeoluwa Ayandele is from Tede, Nigeria. He is the author of My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body, winner of the 2024 Moon City Poetry Award, forthcoming in Moon City Press at Missouri State University. His poetry is a finalist for the 2025 Poetic Justice Institute Editor's Prize for BIPOC Writers, the 2025 Glass Chapbook Series, a two-time semi-finalist for the Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes, a semi-finalist for the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, and the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. His work has been nominated for the Best New Poets, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net awards. His recent work is published in Magma, Transition Magazine, Poetry Wales, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Great River Review, and The Texas Review. He is a PhD student at Florida State University, where he also received his MFA in Creative Writing.

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Emmanuel G. G. Yamba is a Liberian writer. His writing has been featured in Pepper Coast Mag, SprinNG, Akpata Magazine, Akowdee, African Writer Magazine, Kalahari Review, The Muse, WSA, and elsewhere.

He was the second runner-up in the 2023 Liberia Association of Writers (LAW) Essay Competition, winner of the 2024 Abu Sherif Poetry Prize, second-place winner of the 2024 Pengician Chapbook Prize, and a finalist for both the 2024 Poetry Journal Prize and the 2025 Quickbite Poetry Prize.

Sherese Francis describes themselves as an AlkyMist of the I-Magination, finding expression through poetry, interdisciplinary arts, workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. Some of their work has been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Furious Flower, Obsidian, Rootwork Journal, The Caribbean Writer, The Operating System, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse.

Sherese has received various awards and residencies from The Caribbean Writer, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Oroko Radio, SeaSalted Honey in Senegal, Voodoonauts, and Baldwin for the Arts. Additionally, Sherese published four chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls (Three Legged Elephant, 2017), Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling (Harlequin Creature, 2018), Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight (DoubleCross Press, 2021) and Lady Liberty Smashing Stones (THRASH Press, 2022), and edited a poetry anthology/guided journal, Baby Suggs and a Purple Butterfly (Get Fresh Books, 2024). In 2024, Sherese won Inverted Syntax’s Aggrey Book Prize for Poetry for PollyNation: A Seminary of Self, which will be published in 2027.

Photo credit: Rosalyn Fernandez

Mona Okulla Obua is a poet, filmmaker and visual artist based in Kampala, Uganda. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Digital Media Culture from Film University “Konrad Wolf” Babelsberg (2017), where she developed a foundation in cinematic storytelling, digital production, and media theory. As a poet she performed on stages in Berlin for many years and is part of the collective „holding space“, a Berlin based collective space for poets of color formed in 2022. As a filmmaker, she has written, directed, and produced award-winning works that explore Afro-surrealist and poetic narratives. Her short film Indigo (2022) won the Special Prize at the International Short Film Festival Berlin and Second Place at the Monologues & Poetry International Film Fest in California in 2023.
In addition to filmmaking, she works as a video artist creating installations at the intersection of storytelling, technology, and environment. Her most recent work is titled YAO (2024), a multi-channel video installation presented at KLA ART Festival, Kampala and at Stokvel Gallery, Johannesburg. Mona was an Artist in Residence at 32 Degrees East, Kampala in 2024, where she further developed her experimental approach to her video practice.

Laura Barker is a writer, artist, and facilitator, and she co-runs runs a queer black writing group in London, UK. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Apparition Lit, midnight & indigo, The Other Stories, Planet Scumm, Middleground, Flame Tree Publishing Gothic Fantasy Anthology Series, Love Letters to Poe, FIYAH, ongoing, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Riptide Journal, Last Girls Club, Showcase: Object & Idea, The Midnight Zone Anthology Series, and Translunar Travelers Lounge. She’s a Taurus Aries stellium and her favourite crisps are Ready Salted.

My name is Ladia Kasimu, a Durban-based poet and community arts organizer, my work is shaped by my experiences as a Black woman, the communities that raised me, and the resilience learned along the way. My work centers themes of identity, womanhood and the everyday stories, my own and those of others, that shape our lives.

I founded a poetry and arts space to support artists in sharing their stories openly and honestly. My broader community involvement, including arts programs and working with local institutions, has engrossed my belief in storytelling as tool for connection and healing.

I have also begun exploring writing art reviews as another way to honour creative voices. I approach my craft and community work with intention , care and a deep respect for the many heritages that shape who we are.

For me writing is both healing and resistance, a way to process trauma, speak for those who are unheard and fight for justice. It also creates connection revealing shared experience that bind us and reminding us that we are never alone in our journeys.

Photo credit: Contemporary Archive Project

Faith Paré is a writer and literary event curator of Afro-Guyanese ancestry in so-called canada. She has performed at national art centres such as the Goldfarb Gallery at York University, La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, and the Winter Garden Theatre, and her work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Ex-Puritan, Contemporary Verse 2, and elsewhere.

Faith is the winner of the 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry from the Writers’ Trust of Canada, and was shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ 2024 Spoken Word Award. She is the grateful recipient of fellowships from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Quebec Writers’ Federation. She lives in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka people. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with Wolsak & Wynn in 2027.

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Roy McFarlane is a Poet, Writer and former Youth & Community Worker born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage, spending most of his years in Wolverhampton and the Black Country and now living in Brighton.
He’s the former Birmingham Poet Laureate and National Canal Laureate. He’s the co-editor of Celebrate Wha? Ten Black British Poets from the Midlands (Smokestack). His three collections are published by Nine Arches Press: Beginning With Your Last Breath and The Healing Next Time (shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize) and his third collection Living by Troubled Waters is out now.
He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a Doctor of Letters by the University of Wolverhampton. He continues to perform nationally and internationally sharing his passion for social justice, equality, identity love and the healing power of poetry as a witness to our times.

Aphra is a poet and writer with a specific interest in Caribbean and Black British literature, having just completed a Masters in Literary Studies: Literature of the Caribbean and its Diasporas. She is part of the Young Critics Scheme for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2025, has won competitions run by the Young Poets Network (part of the Poetry Society), as well as the 2024 short story competition by the Serendipity Institute of Black Arts and Heritage, which was subsequently published in their annual BlackInk magazine.

Gemma Bedeau is a multidisciplinary writer represented by Independent Talent.
Her work explores desire, diaspora and the messy brilliance of human connection.
She has written for Entitled (Two Brothers Pictures, Showtime, Channel 4), CBeebies’ JoJo and Gran Gran, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio Leeds, and has developed projects across children’s and adult drama.
Her stage work includes commissions with Freedom Studios and development with Leeds Playhouse.

She is an alum of BBC Writersroom Northern Voices, and her original script Unbeweaveable was optioned by Lighthouse Film and Television.
Gemma is currently working on her first poetry collection, weaving themes of longing, inheritance, vulnerability and the rituals of intimacy within the Black British experience.

Photo credit: Teal Moss Photography

Lester Batiste is a savage writer in living color who writes for political, social, economic change and Black futures. Born in Chicago, IL, he holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast writing program, and an M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania. Influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, and Toni Morrison, Lester strives to weave traditional forms and techniques with the vibrancy of African American experience and speech. Rich details are enhanced by the musical tones from Lester’s childhood on the Southside of Chicago to his present on the Northside of Minneapolis. Lester's work has appeared in print in The Stone House Anthology (2014), the Southern Griot Journal (2012), Tulane Review (2017), A Garden of Black Joy (2020), and digitally in the Brushfire Literary and Arts Journal (2020), Hidden Peak Press (2022), The Indianapolis Review (2023), and The Bitchin’ Kitsch (2023). In 2025, he received the BIPOC Emerging Writer award from Blue Earth Review. Lester’s debut poetry collection, Angel and Night’s Youngest, is forthcoming in 2026 with the Black Spring Press Group (UK).

Photo credit: Zoe Prinds-flash

Shanita Alvarez writes for and toward the possibilities of being/feeling grounded, of place and sitting right with time. She seeks languages of the everyday, languages—enduring and growing—toward self-determination. Her poetry has appeared in Emergent Literary, Inverted Syntax (Fissured Tongue Series), Four Way Review, SAND Journal, Bombay Gin, Callaloo, New American Writing, and African American Review, among other publications. She is grateful to the respective editors, these literary spaces and more for providing room for her words.

Donauta Watson is a Brooklyn based poet, writer, performer and arts administrator writing often in the Jamaican language of patwa. Frequently, she writes about the undocumented American experience through the exploration of various intersectional identities. She has been published in the Yale Review, New Square, Misfit Sisters, Pen America's Dreaming Out Loud Anthology I- III, Revista de la Universidad de México, and Spoken Black Girl. Donauta holds a MFA from New York University.

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Ejiro Elizabeth Edward is a passionate lover of the arts. She is the winner of Antoa Poetry Contest and the Ken Saro Wiwa Prize for review. She is also the second runner up for fiction and nonfiction prizes. She has been published in Room Magazine, Reckoning magazine, Isele magazine, Lolwe amongst many others. She is the co-convener of Benin Arts and Book Festival, a literary foundation that is based in Benin, Nigeria. She loves to dance, read and travel and is looking at publishing her set of poetry pieces that integrates multimodal concepts into it.

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Gemma Weekes is a poet, playwright, multi-disciplinary performer, screenwriter, lecturer and author of critically-acclaimed novel Love Me (Chatto & Windus, also translated into Dutch and Italian). Her theatre work has been performed at venues including Stratford East Theatre Royal, The Royal Festival Hall, and most recently at Soho House with her Nina Simone-inspired piece When You Are Silent in late 2021 and her Nicki Giovanni-inspired piece B.R.I.B.E. in 2025 both for the Monolithic series. As a screenwriter, she’s worked with the BBC on several episodes of their animated television series JoJo & Gran Gran, most notably It’s Time to Visit St Lucia (co-written with writer Ashley Joseph) which won a Royal Television Award in 2023. She’s worked with the Line Animation since 2020 as a story consultant, copywriter and screenwriter, producing work for brands such as Acura, Chobani and Riot Games and developing a show concept for Netflix. Her poetry and short fiction appear in anthologies including IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (Penguin, 2001and 2021), Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different (Corsair, 2022) and most recently in Glimpse (Peepal Tree, 2022). She has over two decades’ experience as a teacher, lecturer and creative facilitator and was commissioned by Writing Our Legacy and South Downs National Park Authority in autumn 2025 to create educational resources for use in schools as part of the Species Stories project. She was recently awarded a Society of Authors Work-in-Progress grant to revise her speculative poetry/novel GRI GRI. She’s represented by Kerry-Ann Bentley.

Originally from the Midlands, Degna Stone is an award-winning poet based in northeast England. They are a contributing editor at The Rialto and a co-founder of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazines. Their debut full-length collection, Proof of Life on Earth, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2022.

Photo credit: Matthew Thompson

I am a spoken word artist, journalist and playwright based in London. My poetry explores themes of justice, identity, climate change and migration. I was Highly Commended in the Slambassadors competition and I am an alumni of the Apples and Snakes Writing Room programme. I have performed at various institutions including the Saatchi Gallery, Victoria & Albert Gallery, the BFI Southbank and The Albany as part of Apples and Snakes theatre show - Cece's Speakeasy. I was part of the BORN:FREE poetry collective in 2024 and dedicated my practice to working across film and theatre through a decolonial lens. I was a Poet in Residence at the Cap and Cans exhibition in London’s Leake Street. I was part of the 2023/24 Old Vic Theatremakers programme and I am currently working on my debut pamphlet.

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley grew up in Cameroon. She has lived between Scotland, Italy and Germany for forty years.She has an MSc in Computational Linguistics from Manchester University and is a part-time, practice-based student at the Research Society for Process Oriented Psychotherapy, studying post-traumatic growth.

She is a joint winner of the James Berry Poetry prize (2024). Radical Pairings (Ignitionpress,2023) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award (2023). She's received a Edwin Morgan Second Life Award (2020) and the RSL Sky award (2021) for creative nonfiction. In 2023, she was Highly Commended in the Poetry Business’ International Poetry and Pamphlet Competition. The Scottish Poetry Library selected How to Eat Frogs for Best Scottish Poems (2021). Her first full-length poetry collection is due to be published by Bloodaxe in 2026.

Shakeema Smalls is a poet and developmental editor from Georgetown, South Carolina. She has been widely published in outlets such as Honey Literary, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Emergent Literary, Tidal Basin Review, Root Work Journal, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fruit Journal, and Foglifter, among others. A Tin House Workshop and VONA alum, she was a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and served as the inaugural Markus D. Manley Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Lab. She was recently named by SouthArts as a 2025 South Carolina Literary Fellow.

Photo credit: Kersten Morrison, More Life Photography

Lillian Akampurira is a writer from Uganda. She emerged commended poet for the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Jalada Prize for Literature, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award, and the Brittle Paper Anniversary Award.
Her writing has been published by Adda, HarperVia, New Internationalist, Prairie Schooner, Transition Magazine, Jalada Africa, Lolwe, Isele, and Jacana Literary Foundation. She is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing program of the University of East Anglia, where she was the recipient of the Global Voices Scholarship. She is waiting to join the PhD English Program at the University Missouri.

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a. adenike phillips (she/her) is a poet, cultural worker and collagist based in New Jersey. She believes in the transformative power of art to heal, disrupt and reshape sight. She writes toward the interior lives of Black people—stories that slip between generations and place, often going unnoticed. Phillips has received support from AWP, Hurston/Wright Foundation, POWERHOUSE Residency, Rutgers' Poets and Scholars Summer Writing Retreat, Arts by the People, and other organizations. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, The Fire Inside Anthology Volume III, Torch Magazine, MER, The Amistad, Gulf Stream Magazine, and elsewhere. Phillips is completing her first full manuscript of poetry.

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Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa is a choreopoet and ethnochoreologist. Safiya’s artistic endeavours range from reviving lost histories to exploring the Black avant-garde. Safiya has won multiple spoken word awards and gained a reputation in poetry for her innovative live-literature performances. In 2020 she was awarded The New Voice in Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Out-Spoken Page Poetry Prize and Creative Future Writer’s Award. In 2022, Safiya transformed a dance notation technique known as Labanotation for the Black diaspora, to explore Blackness in colonial space while studying poetry and dance form.

Her debut poetry collection Cane, Corn & Gully (2022) was curated using the movements of enslaved Barbadian women. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize and Felix Dennis Forward Prize for best first collection. A copy of the collection resides at the National Museum of Barbados; it also won the 2023 Barbados’ ‘Gine On’ People’s Choice Awards for best book. Notable journal publications include POETRY, Callaloo, Wasafiri, Poetry London, and The Caribbean Writer. Safiya is currently a PhD student in Cultural Studies, and an Obsidian Foundation fellow.

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Jacqueline Ennis Cole is an emerging poet and writer. She received a Poem Brut Commission Award in 2019 and has performed at several Poem Brut performance events including at Rich Mix and A Hundred Year Gallery. A recipient of the Spread the Word Deaf and Disabled Writers' Commission Award 2023, as well as delivering 'Mutterings' a speculative performance at the Lewisham Literature Festival 2024. She was invited to a reading at Language Matters: Creative-Critical Practice Symposium, at Nottingham Contemporary in 2023 and was also invited to read her written piece at PolyVocalCity at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2023. Her writing was published with Worms Magazine and she was invited to perform her writing at WORMS at the Barbican - A Literary Ecosystem Conservatory Well in 2025.

Lisa Lore is a Multidisciplinary Performing Artist working in Acting, Music, Spoken Word, Poetry and Sound. Based in London of Jamaican, American and British heritage, she works under the banner of Quantum Noir Nubluz Aesthete, an Afrofuturistic blend of here and there.

LiSa LoRe
aka Quantuum Noir NuBluz Aesthete
aka Beyond-Black-with-Raw-Beauty
aka Transforming from Source
aka Product-of-All-that-Came-Before
aka Knowledge = Power,
Never forget your LORE.

Thru(tru)-line from Ancestors, carrying on Sojourning

"She speaks the Secrets"

“Storyteller, Griot, Keeper-of-the-Lore, Medicine Woman”
"A Female Gil Scott Heron (in the tradition of)"

"PoetProphetessEmpath...
Roots
Run
DeepSoul
Black2daFuture…”

A Timeless Fusion of Voice & SpokenWord.

Performing Artist, Broadcaster, Host. Singer, Actor, Musician, Sound Artist and Model. Published in Spread The Word’s “Mouth Mek F’yam” and Writing Our Legacy’s “Textured #1” zine. Obsidian Poetry Foundation Fellow.

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Therí Alyce Pickens is a poet-scholar who specializes in Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies. She has written two academic monographs: New Body Politics (Routledge 2014), and Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke 2019). She has also edited three volumes of academic work including Arab American Aesthetics (Routledge 2018) and special issues of African American Review (2017) and College Language Association Journal (2021). Her poetry collection, What Had Happened Was (Duke), debuted in March 2025.

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Gustavo Adolfo Aybar is a Dominican-born writer and translator. He is a graduate of the
University of Missouri-Kansas City where he received his MA in Romance Languages and
Literature. His chapbook Between Line Breaks was released May 2016 from Spartan Press, and
his first full-length collection, We Seek Asylum in 2017 through Willow Books. Aybar has
translated the work of Mexican author/playwright Glafira Rocha; some of those texts can be
found in The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation Journal, Asymptote, and the EZRA Journal of
Translation.

Some of his essays, poetry, and other writing have been published in Delmarva Review, Dos
Gatos Press, 3 Taos Press ABC-CLIO, The Rupture Magazine, Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-
Latin@ Poets, The Library of America Anthology: Latino Poetry, and South Florida Poetry
Journal. His work discusses immigration baseball, fatherhood, and the dictatorship in the
Dominican Republic, while his recent manuscript in-progress, Ambush, highlights life as a
single-father, raising his teenage son, and Aybar’s previous, yet brief, law enforcement
experience. A few of those texts can be found in the above cited, and Glint Literary Journal,
Space on Space Magazine, Spanglish Voces, with others forthcoming from Purple Ink Press’
online anthology on Tender Masculinities.

Odunoluwa (Odun) is a Nigerian poet based in London, UK. By day, she works as a cross-border lawyer at the intersection of technology and law. By calling, she has returned to poetry, her first love from secondary school.

She writes ThoughtDump on Substack and in 2025 launched "Poems from My Land," a weekly series featuring poets of African descent and their poems. She is working on her first collection.

A seeker, learner, nomad, and lover, Odunoluwa approaches poetry with the rigour of her legal background and the perspective of a life lived across continents. Though returning to poetry in her 40s, she's committed to a long and fulfilling career in poetry, building her practice one poem at a time.

Maureen Onwunali is a Dublin-born Nigerian poet and a two-time national slam champion. Her work has been featured by various musicians, radio shows, and organisations, including BFI, Pearson, Penguin, BBC Radio London, Roundhouse, TEDx, Apples and Snakes, and the Poetry Society.

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Bonita Lee Penn is a Black woman poet and multi-media artist from Pittsburgh. Her work explores identity, memory, spirituality, and the lived experiences of the Black diaspora. Guided by ancestral remembrance and global soundscapes, her practice reflects the Sankofa principle of reaching back to move forward, approaching poetry as an act of witness, healing, and transformation.

She is the recipient of the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant for Gospel in the Wake, a stage performance inspired by her Pentecostal upbringing and Gullah Geechee Ring Shout traditions, and the Aggie Brose Award for transformative storytelling amplifying the Black experience.

Penn is the author of When the Trees Finally Testify and Every Morning a Foot is Looking for My Neck, and a contributor to the award-winning anthology Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience. Her work also appears in The Massachusetts Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Skinny Journal, and others.

She holds an MFA from Lesley University and serves on the Board of Sweetwater Center for the Arts. Penn is Managing Editor of Soul Pitt Quarterly Magazine, a Madwomen in the Attic workshop facilitator, and a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Fellow.

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A Cave Canem fellow, Watering Hole graduate fellow, and Scioto Retreat Cohort, Ed is a Pushcart nominee, and was commissioned to craft a speech encompassing the Freedom Award recipients for 2017-2021 on behalf of the National Civil Rights Museum. An NAACP Image Award Nominee, Ed's been on TV One, as well as ABC, FOX, HBO, CNN, CBS, and NBC. Ed is a choreopoet, screenwriter, actor, a Grammy Voting Member, and a member of Phi Theta Kappa and Gamma Beta Phi. Ed will graduate in May 2025 with an MFA from Adephi University. Ed is also considered the greatest poet in the history of Poetry Slam, with four World Championships and seven consecutive regional titles.

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Roman Johnson, PhD is a writer and scientist from Memphis, TN. He is a second–year MFA student in poetry at Brown University and the winner of the Clark Atlanta Poetry Prize and the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press. He is a 2025 Lambda Literary Workshop Fellow in Fiction and has received numerous other fellowships and residencies from institutions like Linda Hall Library, Breadloaf, Tin House, and Knoll Farm. His writing is found, or forthcoming, in publications such American Literary Review, Obsidian, African Voices, and elsewhere.

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Randolph Knighten, Jr is a minister, community organizer, writer and a public school mentor and advocate. He has been a Community Fellow with the Community Resilience Project at the University of Texas. He received the 2024 Austin Independent School District's Friend of Education Award for his work in public schools. Randolph has a Master’s Degree in Theological Studies and received the Ethel W. Lance Human and Civil Rights Award from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is also a member of the Children’s Defense Fund-Texas Advisory Council. His poems, stories, sermons and other folklore pieces are rooted in his experience of growing up in the American South. Randolph’s worldview has been thoroughly shaped by the tragedies of the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the burning of Black churches in the American South in the 1990s and Hurricane Katrina in 2004.

Jubril Badmus is a West African writer, currently based in Austin, Texas. He writes poetry. His works have been published or are forthcoming in The Berlin Literary, Gutter Magazine, Syncopation, Aké Review, and more. He is a 2025 Round Top Fellow. He holds an MFA degree in creative writing from Texas State University and a master’s in Management and Innovations from the University of Stirling, Scotland. He is the immediate past reviews editor at Porter House Review. He is currently working on his debut collection. He enjoys critical theory, especially cultural dialectics.

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Nicole Alexander is a poetess and educator based in Brooklyn. She graduated from Syracuse University in 2020, earning a BA in English and textual studies with a concentration in creative writing. During the warmer months, Nicole writes personalized poems for strangers in NYC parks for her social art project, A Poem, From Me To You. Her chapbook, Why I Love Dreaming, was released in 2024.

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W.J. Lofton is a Black Queer Southern poet and multimodal artist. He is the author of boy maybe and A Garden for Black Boys Between the Stages of Soil and Stardust. A recipient of Ava DuVernay’s LEAP Grant, Lofton is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and an Emory University Arts & Social Justice fellow. His poetry, essays, and film work have appeared in TIME, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Obsidian, and Scalawag; in the books No Justice, No Peace and Prose to the People, and elsewhere. Lofton’s work reaches for liberation and its lived manifestations—the personal, political, and collective. He resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he co-curates Rebellion: A Writing Salon at For Keeps Books.

Photo credit: Wulf Bradley