Aurora Masum-Javed is a poet, educator, and theater-maker. A McKnight Fellow and Jerome Fellow, she has done lots of art-things like residencies and an MFA, but mostly she loves to talk to trees, sunset swim, and take good care of her friends. She’s currently working on her first book and periodically teaching at Macalester College. 

Davi Gray (she/they) is a queer, trans, nonbinary poet, writer, performer, multihyphenate artist, activist, and abolitionist. They live in Minneapolis (Bde Óta Othúŋwe), on unceded lands of the Dakota and Ojibwe, where she works through the ReEntry Lab to connect writers and other artists leaving incarceration with literary and arts communities ready to receive them.

Davi has work published in Poetry, Water~Stone Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere, and can often be found performing around the Twin Cities. You can find more on Davi and her work, including publications and upcoming events, at DaviGray.com.

Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. Sharkey edited the anthology, A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, published by Milkweed Editions. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University. She is the producer of film projects, including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution (Hulu), which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Erin teaches at Minneapolis College and with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW)/ReEntry Lab. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, the Jerome Foundation, and the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. Sharkey is a steward cooperative member of the Fields at Rootsprings Retreat, a land-based Cooperative stewarding space for the healing and development of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) artists, activists, healers, and community centering Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) folx in Central Minnesota.

jd hegarty is a poet, an anarchist, and a sunflower living in Minneapolis, Minnesota with two cats. jd’s work can be found in various places on the internet. Their first chapbook, On Passing, was published by Red Bird Chapbooks in 2017 and their self-published chapbook of sad gay love poems, the clearest blue, is available for free at jdhegarty.com. Follow jd: @josiedumbass.bsky.social

José Felipe Ozuna is a poet born in Guerrero, Mexico and living in Minneapolis, MN. He is a 2022 Undocupoets Fellow and a 2023–24 Mentor Series Fellow. His poems are published in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Muzzle, and the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora. He hosts G+A+T+H+E+R, a generative poetry workshop.

Sara Dovre Wudali grew up on a farm in southwest Minnesota, where the wind blows through the cottonwoods and box elder bugs rule. She was a 2023–2024 Poetry Fellow in the Loft Mentor Series and has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Her poems and essays have been published in literary journals and anthologies such as under the gum tree, Barrelhouse, North Dakota Quarterly, and the Sweet. She is the co-editor of the chapbook, All You Need is One Avocado and a mentor with the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop. Dovre Wudali lives in Saint Paul with her family. You can learn more and read her work at saradovrewudali.com.