Mariam Bazeed is an Egyptian immigrant living in a rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn. Mariam received their MFA in Fiction from Hunter College, and is a singer, playwright, and performance artist. They have been the recipient of fellowships/residencies from Asian American Writers Workshop, the Hemispheric Institute at NYU, Lambda Literary, Millay Colony, and Hedgebrook. 

J K Chukwu is a writer and visual artist from the Midwest. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. She was a 2019 Lambda Fellow and her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, and TAYO.

Edgar Gomez is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, his writing has been published widely in such outlets as POPSUGAR, Narratively, Best Gay Stories, and The Rumpus. His memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, about coming-of-age as a queer man in a culture of machismo, is forthcoming in fall of 2021 with Soft Skull Press. He lives in Queens, New York. More at EdgarGomez.net. 

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. A proud native of Harlem, her debut short story collection Blue Talk and Love won the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her forthcoming book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, explores the politics of experiment in black queer and feminist literary cultures.