Ariana BENSON is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral  (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.

Jessica CUELLO’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book Liar,  selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, was honored with The Eugene Nassar Prize, The CNY Book Award, and a finalist nod for The Housatonic Book Award. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2022 Nina Riggs Poetry Prize, two CNY Book Awards, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in CNY.

Prairie Moon DALTON is an Appalachian poet born and raised in Western North Carolina. A 2020 Bucknell fellow and Neil Postman award winner, her work has appeared in Rattle, The Adroit Journal, The Allegheny Review, and elsewhere. Prairie is currently pursuing an MFA at NC State University.