Robert Carr, t’ai freedom ford, Rickey Laurentiis, Francisco-Luis White
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth (Indolent Books, 2016). Recent work appears in the Bellevue Literary Review, Kettle Blue Review, New Verse News, Radius Literary Magazine, Pretty Owl Poetry, and other publications. His poem “Censor Approaching” appears in the anthology If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden, Massachusetts, and serves as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Learn more at robertcarr.org
t’ai freedom ford is the author of how to get over (Red Hen Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. She is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Drunken Boat; Sinister Wisdom; No, Dear; The African American Review; Vinyl; Muzzle; Poetry, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015), edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall. In 2012 and 2013, she completed two multi-city tours as part of a queer women of color literary salon, The Revival. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, but hangs out digitally at shesaidword.com.
Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 Levis Reading Prize, winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (selected by Terrance Hayes), and a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and one of the 16 best poetry books of 2015 by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions. His poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry, as well as in the anthologies Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers Speak of Palestine (Olive Branch Press, 2016), edited by Ru Freeman; Bettering American Poetry 2015 (Bettering Books, 2017), edited by Kenzie Allen, Eunsong Kim, Amy King, and others; and Prospect.3: Notes for Now (Prestel, 2014), edited by Pieter Hugo, Pushpamala N., Claire Arni, and others. Rickey lives and teaches in New York.
Francisco-Luis White is the author of Found Them (CreateSpace, 2016). An Afro-Latinx and non-binary writer residing in the District of Columbia, they have a collection of poems forthcoming from Indolent Books. They have been featured in conversation for Winter Tangerine, with work forthcoming in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Lambda Literary Review.