Kimberly A. Collins is the author of Choose You! Wednesday Wisdom to Wake Your Soul (CreateSpace, 2017), Slightly off Center (Say It Loud Press, 1991), supported by a grant from the Georgia Council of Arts, and Bessie’s Resurrection (Forthcoming from Indolent Books in 2019). She received her MFA in Poetry from Spalding University and her MA in American and African American Literature from Howard University. She is a Callaloo fellow whose writing appears in the Pittsburg Poetry Review, Truth Feasting, the Berkeley Review, Catalyst, Heart and Soul, and Essence, as well as well as in the Syracuse Cultural Workers’ 2017 Women Artist Datebook. Her work has also appeared in NOBO: A Journal of African American Dialogue; Revise the Psalm: The Gwendolyn Brooks Anthology (Curbside Splendor, 2017), edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana and Sandra Jackson-Opoku; Black Poets of the Deep South; In The Tradition; The Nubian Gallery: A Poetry Anthology (Blacfax Publications, 2001), edited by Bob McNeil; Theorizing Black Feminism: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (Routledge, 1993) edited by Stanlie M. James, Abena P. A. Busia; and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora (Third World Press (Aprilm,2007), edited by Randall Horton, M L Hunter, and Becky Thompson. She is a contributor to the Contemporary Black British Writers volume of the The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Collins teaches at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
Nicole Cooley is the author of five poetry collections, including Of Marriage (Alice James Books, 2018), Girl after Girl after Girl (LSU Press, 2017), Milk Dress, (Alice James Books, 2010), Breach (Louisiana State University Press, 2009), The Afflicted Girls (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), and Resurrection (Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Field, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Paris Review, PEN America, The Missouri Review, The Nation, and Pedagogy, among other journals. Cooley holds a BA from Brown University, an MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD from Emory University. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College of the City University of New York.
Meher Manda is a poet, short story writer, journalist, and educator from Mumbai, India, currently living in New York. She earned her MFA in Fiction from the College of New Rochelle, and was the founding editor-in-chief of The Canopy Review. She teaches fiction and poetry writing to undergraduates at the College of New Rochelle and is a teaching artist with Community-Word Project and Teachers & Writers. She co-hosts An Angry Reading Series in Harlem and is currently working on her debut prose-poetry collection.