Booker is an award winning author, educator, and poet. She is the author of Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home, winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She currently teaches Writing and Digital Media at Morgan State University. 

Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction,  Dead Boys (Little A, 2016), and in 2016 she was named Critic at Large for the Los Angeles Times Book Section. Her essays and poems have also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, Literary Hub, Convolution, HEArt, Apogee, and on Nerve.com. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she cofounded the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.

Shah inspires change as a nonprofit consultant and writer. During the tenth anniversary of 9/11, she directed Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight Asian American voices and experiences. Her first poetry collection, Terrain Tracks, won the Many Voices Project prize, and her chaplet, Dark Lip of the Beloved: Sound Your Fiery God-Praise, explores women and being. She currently serves as a board member of The Poetry Project in New York. Her favorite art practices are her sparkly eyeshadow and raucous laughter.

Shotland is the author of the novel Junkette, and a playwright whose work has been performed in theaters nationally and internationally. She is co-founder and Program Director of Words Without Walls, which brings creative writing to jails, prisons, and drug treatment centers in Pittsburgh. She regularly writes about art as a tool of prison abolition, some of which has been published in The Iowa Review, Baltimore Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. You can listen to her super-short, 140 second talk about art and abolition HERE. Sarah's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Heinz Foundation, Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Santa Fe Art Institute's Equal Justice Residency. She teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University.

Young is a Cuban-American novelist, investigative journalist, and co-founder of Investigate West. She currently freelances from the Pacific Northwest for the Washington Post, the Guardian and the New York Times. Kristen was the only non-staffer on the Pulitzer Prize winning team that produced SnowFall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek for the New York Times. Her personal essays have been anthologized in Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity and Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze, a NYTimes New & Notable. Young was a 2010 multimedia reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and a 2010-2012 GO-MAP Fellow at the University of Washington, where she earned her MFA. Launching in April 2020, her debut novel SUBDUCTION is a lyric retelling of the troubled history of encounter in the Americas. Young is currently the Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle.