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.

Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. Her most recent collection, Wellwater (2025), has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. The Caiplie Caves (2019) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Her work has been awarded the Griffin Prize, Trillium Poetry Prize, Latner Poetry Prize, a Canada Council Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for an artist in mid-career, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her visiting writer residencies include the University of Toronto's Massey College, the University of California at Berkeley, York University, and she will be the Shaftesbury Creative Writer in Residence for Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 2026. She currently teaches creative writing half-time for the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and lives the rest of the year in Canada.

Rita Bullwinkel is the author of two books: Headshot (2024) and Belly Up (2018).  Headshot was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. It was also longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. In 2025 Bullwinkel was awarded the Addison M. Metcalf Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which biennially honors a young American writer of great promise. She is also a 2022 recipient of a Whiting Award, the Editor of McSweeney's Quarterly, a Contributing Editor at NOON, the creator of Oral Florist, the former Deputy Editor of The Believer, and the former Assistant Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail. A selection of each McSweeney’s Quarterly issue she edits is produced for audio by The New York Times. In addition to editing McSweeney’s Quarterly (the house’s magazine of art and literature) she also edits one book-length work a year for McSweeney’s Book Division. Books for which she has served as editor have been longlisted for National Book Award and named a best book of the year by The Chicago Review of Books.

rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). mclennan is both the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival and the publisher of Canada’s most prolific small press, above/ground press – which he has edited for over 30 years.

Guggenheim fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books, including the poetry volumes Death Styles and Toxicon and Arachne (both Nightboat Books); the eco-decadent poetics book The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series); and the verse-play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, which was selected to inaugurate the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Women Performance Writers. In 2022, McSweeney received the Shelley Memorial Award for "poetic genius" from the Poetry Society of America. With Johannes Göransson, she is the co-founder of the international press Action Books which has help build global audiences for poets and translators like Kim Hyesoon, Raúl Zurita, Don Mee Choi and others. She lives in the Great Lakes region of the US and is Chair of the English Department at the University of Notre Dame.

Dr.Tyler Mills is the author of the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024), which received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poetry guidebook, Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets, a pedagogical book for new and experienced poets, appeared in June 2024 from the University of Akron Press. A poet and essayist, Tyler’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, the Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Poetry, Lit Hub, River Teeth, The Rumpus, and more. She is the author of the poetry books City Scattered (2022), Hawk Parable (2019), Tongue Lyre (2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (2021). She has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Chicago, teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute, and lives in New York City.

Dr. Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor and educator based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her publications include Some Deer, (Broken Sleep, 2024), Corpses (Sublunary Editions, 2020), Disrupted Blue and Other Poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock, 2021) and Strangers Wave (zimZalla, 2023). In the UK, Vik’s work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, PN Review, The Rialto, Magma; in the US: Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, The Indianapolis Review and Tiny Molecules. Vik co-edits Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius and Firmament online for Sublunary Editions. She is a Poetry School Tutor and has a PhD in ‘Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry’ from the University of Birmingham. Vik also founded Disrupted Blue Indie Press Publicity and works with small presses all over the world. In May 2025, Vik’s third photo poetry collection Persona Digitalia was selected for the inaugural P5—PhotoWorks series.