Eddie Ahn

Eddie Ahn is an environmental justice attorney and nonprofit worker based in San Francisco. He is a self-taught artist who has been recognized as a Cartoonist-in-Residence by the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. 'Advocate' is his debut graphic novel.

Mia Birdsong

Mia Birdsong is a pathfinder and futurist who reconnects us with our forgotten wisdom and practices of collective liberation. She is the author of How We Show Up and the founding Executive Director of Next River, an institute for practicing…

Ari Berman

Ari Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. He’s the author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) and Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, and he is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and NPR. He's won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize for Magazine Journalism and an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media. He lives in New Paltz, New York.

Isis Asare

Isis Asare earned a degree in psychology from Stanford University. She then lived in Ghana, where her parents are from, as part of the Peace Corps. Her subsequent life chapters were filled with graduate degrees from Columbia Business School and Harvard University, a career in tech at companies such as Microsoft, Shutterfly, and Brightroll, and starting a film entertainment site for queer women of color named Sistah Sinema which Asare sold for 2x revenue in 2010. In 2019, Isis Asare started Sistah Scifi, the first Black owned bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy. Located primarily in cyberspace, Sistah Scifi launched three Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine in 2023. In 2024, Isis Asare selected as the first African American executive director of Aunt Lute Books, a San Francisco based, non-profit feminist press.

Nefertiti Asanti

Nefertiti Asanti is a poet from the Bronx residing in Oakland, CA. Nefertiti is a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Watering Hole, Lambda Literary, Anaphora Arts, Winter Tangerine, Museum of the African Diaspora, PEN America, VONA, and SeaSalted Honey. Nefertiti’s debut chapbook fist of wind won the inaugural Start a Riot! Chapbook Prize. They’re also a recipient of the 2023 SFF/Nomadic Press Literary Award. Their work can be found at Foglifter, Split Lip Magazine, Santa Fe Writer’s Project, and elsewhere.

Yaffa AS

Mx. Yaffa is a an author and storyteller that paves the way for us to imagine utopia through every word. Having shared their story with over 300,000 audience members at speaking events globally. Mx. Yaffa is an acclaimed disabled, autistic, trans, queer, Muslim, and indigenous Palestinian individual who has received multiple awards for their transformative work around displacement, decolonization, equity, and centering the lived experiences of individuals most impacted by injustice. Mx. Yaffa is the Executive Director of Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), as well as the founder of several non-profits and community projects. Mx. Yaffa is an engineer, death and birthing doula, peer support specialist, consultant, and artist.

Dan Alter

Dan Alter’s poems, reviews and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection “My Little Book of Exiles” won the 2022 Cowan Poetry Prize. A volume of translations “Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited,” from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe, was published by Ben Yehuda Press in September 2024, and “Hills Full of Holes,” a second collection of poems, by Fernwood Press in March 2025. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.

Wahab Algarmi

Wahab Algarmi is a writer and comic artist. He has been creating comics and a community space for other artists in the San Francisco Bay Area for years. Some of his past comic work includes The Society of Unordinary Young Ladies, which has been well reviewed by numerous news outlets, including the Comics Beat, Newsarama, and USA Today. He was also a recent recipient of one the inaugural grants from the city of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Division, the Akonadi Foundation, and the East Bay Community Foundation for his comic work Town Force 1 and the Battle for East Oakland. For years, he also worked with another arts nonprofit, Kearny Street Workshop, to spotlight emerging Asian American artists. He currently lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and children.

James Cagney

Cave Canem fellow James Cagney is the award winning author of Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2023) and MARTIAN: The Saint Of Loneliness (Nomadic Press, 2022). Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive will be released by Black Lawrence Press this July, 2025. He was born, raised, and currently resides in Oakland, Ca. Visit his website JamesCagneyPoet.com.

Stephanie L. Canizales

Coming Soon!