Danielle Legros Georges is Boston's Poet Laureate. She was born in Haiti but grew up in Boston's Haitian community in Mattapan. She has been teaching in Lesley University's Creative Arts in Learning Division since 2001. Her recent literary awards include the 2014 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the 2012 Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist in Poetry, Lesley University Faculty Development Grants, and a 2013 Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship/Andrew W. Mellon Grant. She’s quoted on the website as saying, “America is best when it recognizes its inherent plurality. Americans are best when, embracing plurality, we move toward and seek to understand those around us. Americans are best when we are engaged and dialogic . . . . It allows us to see that, though different in many ways, de Crèvecoeur, Wheatley, and Lazarus, were each immigrants or the daughter of immigrants. They were bicultural, and bilingual, if not speakers of several languages.”

Sarah Ladipo Manyika was raised in Nigeria and has lived in Kenya, France, and England. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and for several years taught literature at San Francisco State University. Sarah currently serves on the boards of Hedgebrook and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Sarah is a Patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature and host to OZY’s video series “Write.” Her second novel “Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun” was shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize.

David Chariandy is a Canadian writer and one of the co-founders of Commodore Books. His debut novel Soucouyant was nominated for ten literary prizes and awards, including the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (longlisted), the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize (longlisted), the 2007 Governor General's Award for Fiction (finalist), the 2007 ForeWord Book of the Year Award for literary fiction from an independent press ("gold" winner), the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book of Canada and the Caribbean (shortlisted), the 2008 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize of the British Columbia Book Prizes (shortlisted), the 2008 City of Toronto Book Award (shortlisted), the 2008 "One Book, One Vancouver" of the Vancouver Public Library (shortlisted), the 2008 Relit Award for best novel from a Canadian independent press (shortlisted), and the 2007 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award (shortlisted). Chariandy has a MA from Carleton and a PhD from York University. He lives in Vancouver and teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University.[1]

Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born poet, educator, publisher and social advocate. He is the author of the chapbook, Higher Ground (Finishing Line Press), which was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award and co-author of The Next Verse Poets Mixtape - Volume One: the 4 X 4.. His poems are forthcoming and have appeared in Interviewing the Caribbean, Pangyrus, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Naugatuck River Review, sx salon, Tidal Basin Review, The Caribbean Writer, among others. His manuscript, When My Body Was a Clinched Fist, was selected as a semi-finalist for the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Book Prize. Surin, a Pushcart nominee, was also recognized as the 2015 PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Surin is Associate Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and is founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press.

Moses Kilolo was born in Nairobi, Kenya. He received a Bachelor’s degree in journalism at the United States International University, Nairobi Campus. Kilolo is the managing editor of Jalada, a Pan-African Writers' collective.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma grew up in Zimbabwe, and has lived in South Africa and the USA. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2015), where she was awarded the prestigious Maytag and Teaching-Writing Fellowships, as well as a Rydson Award for Excellence in Fiction. She served as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Iowa in 2015-2016, was a 2016 Writer-in-Residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and is a recipient of a prestigious 2017 Bellagio Center Literary Arts Residency Award from the Rockefeller Foundation for her novel project House of Stone. House of Stone is forthcoming in June 2018 with Atlantic Books in the UK and in January 2019 with W. W. Norton in the USA. Novuyo serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee literature based in New York. She earned her BCom in Economics and Finance from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Phanuel Antwi is assistant professor of English at University of British Columbia. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”