Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of Interior with Sudden Joy (1999), Human Dark with Sugar (2008), and Our Andromeda (2012). She is the winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and her work has appeared in the Yale Review, the Boston Review, McSweeney’s, and Best American Poetry, among other places.
Metta Sáma teaches in the CUNY system; she currently directs the BFA-W program at Goddard College. Her poems, reviews, and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in hercircleezine, Vinyl, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Pebble Lake Review, among others. She is author of South of Here from New Issues Press.
Moderator Zakia Henderson-Brown has received fellowships and scholarships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Callaloo Journal, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Torch, Reverie, Burner Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and the anthology Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos: 2011). She currently works as the Outreach Coordinator for The New Jim Crow at The New Press.
New York City, NY; NYC