Eirinie Carson is an award-winning Black British writer and college dropout living in California. She writes about sexual taboos, death and dying, illegal substances, hauntings both real and imagined, and ancestral inheritance in a world desperate to sever the connections between what came before and what is to come. Her work has appeared in LitHub, the Notre Dame Review, Electric Literature, the Sonora Review, the Los Angeles Review, The Unibrow, and other venues. Her first work of fiction, the maternal gothic novel, Bloodfire, Baby (Dutton, 2026), has been named one of the year’s best debuts by Debutiful. Eirinie’s first book, the memoir The Dead Are Gods (Melville House, 2023), was critically acclaimed in Oprah Daily, Nylon, Shondaland, and the Washington Post, and was named one of the year’s best books by Kirkus Reviews.

Kerry Donoghue is the author of MOUTH (Unsolicited Press, 2025). Her poetry and stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Painted Bride Quarterly, Permafrost, The Louisville Review, and The South Carolina Review, among other journals. She earned an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco and was a fiction cohort for the 2025 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out publicity incubator. MOUTH is her first book. Get to know her at kerrydonoghue.com.

aracelis girmay is the author of four full-length poetry collections including the recently published GREEN OF ALL HEADS. She is also the editor of the anthology So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth as well as How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Her writing has appeared in e-flux, Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Recent collaborations include performance, picture books, and a chapbook project with artist Valentina Améstica. girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and teaches at Stanford University. She lives in the East Bay.

Laleh Khadivi is the author of four novels, including The Age of Orphans, which received a Whiting Writers' Award; The Walking; A Good Country, a New York Times Editors' Choice; and Female Life on Planet Earth, forthcoming in 2026. Her essays, stories, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, LA Times, McSweeney's and Lithub among others. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Stein Fellowship at Stanford University, and a John Felice Fellowship in Rome. A former documentary filmmaker, she has taught and spoken at universities and literary festivals across the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Born in Esfahan, Iran, she works now as an Associate Professor and Chair of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and lives in the Bay Area with her excellent family and two very good dogs.