Anika Fajardo is the award-winning author of The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore, an International Latino Book Award Gold Medal winner. She is also the author of Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family, and the middle-grade novels What If a Fish and Meet Me Halfway. Born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota, she currently lives with her family in Minneapolis.

Claudette M. Webster is a faculty member of the Dougherty Family College, at the University of St. Thomas, where she teaches English. She is originally from Jamaica, West Indies and has spent much of her life in the Northeast: New York & Massachusetts. She moved to the Midwest in 2018.  Ms. Webster is Board President of the Saint Paul Almanac. Also, she is a board member of Redbird Chapbook Press, a volunteer led literary arts organization, where she engages in community outreach. Ms. Webster is a writer of poetry and prose. She was recently published in Let the Black Woman Say Ashe’ edited by Ebony Adedayo. Past publications include Black Renaissance Noire, Essence Magazine, Pitkin Review & Cave Canem Anthology. Ms. Webster is an avid walker; she loves being outdoors in nature, especially near water. She aspires to visit each of the 10,000 lakes in Minnesota. 

Webster is an avid walker; she loves being outdoors in nature, especially near water.
She aspires to visit each of the 10,000 lakes in Minnesota.

Dorcy Jaffray is a writer from Minneapolis. She was a 2023-2024 fellow in the Mentor Series program through The Loft Literary Center and has a tendency to write fiction that makes her parents mildly horrified. 

Karlyn Coleman is a writer, teacher, and creative collaborator based in Minneapolis. Her short stories have won awards and appear in Sycamore Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Water~Stone Review, Paper Darts, Revolver, and Crab Orchard Review. She is the author of the picture books The Great Get-Together and Where Are All the Minnesotans?  from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Under her pen name, K.R. Coleman, she has written nine young adult novels for Lerner’s Darby Creek Series. Her honors include a Sustainable Arts Grant, a Minnesota Emerging Writers Grant, Minnesota State Arts Grant, and a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series award. 

Zeke Caligiuri is a writer from South Minneapolis. His memoir: This is Where I Am (UMN Press), was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. He is co-founder of the Stillwater Writer’s Collective, an editor and contributor to the recent anthology: American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion published by Coffee House Press. He is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration and currently works with the Minnesota Justice Research Center helping to empower system-impacted people and reinvesting in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. He was named as an inaugural Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow.