Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Mahogany L. Browne, a Kennedy Center’s Next 50 fellow, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne’s books include Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky, Black Girl Magic, and banned books Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice and Woke Baby. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree awarded by Marymount Manhattan College and is the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center.

Ching-In Chen is author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems; and Shiny City as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency’s Governing Council and on Seattle City of Literature’s board. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They serve as Kundiman’s Pacific Northwest chapter co-lead and on the board. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2025) and I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She also wrote the chapbook Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Best American Poetry 2022, and other notable publications. She is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Clark is at work on a memoir-in-essays, Begging to Be Saved, exploring Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art-making, and historical and contemporary methods of Black survival.

Gabby Trúc Cohen is an Axinn Fellow at New York University and former Periplus Collective Fellow (2022-2023). Her fiction and creative nonfiction has been supported by Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Writing by Writers, DVAN, The Sun, and Roxane Gay’s, The Audacity. A 2019-2020 Princeton in Asia Public Health Fellow in Vietnam and former humanitarian aid worker, she has also reported on food/water security, refugee, and climate issues from Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Indonesia, Colombia, Guatemala, Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

Dr. Adam Falkner (he/him) is a writer, performer & educator. His work focuses on intersectional themes of race, gender, queer life, and social justice education. He is the author of The Willies (Winner of the 2021 Midwestern Independent Book Award and a 2021 Foreword Reviews Gold Medal) and Adoption (Winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Award), and his writing has been featured on programming for HBO, in The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He has toured the United States as a guest artist, lecturer and trainer, and was the featured performer at President Obama’s Grassroots Ball at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration.

Gabriela Denise Frank is a literary artist, editor, educator, and winner of the Fern Academy Prize. The author of How to Not Become the Breaking (Gateway Literary Press, 2025) her writing, interviews, and visual art appear in BOMB Magazine, Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Epoch, DIAGRAM, EcoTheo Review, Northwest Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Two of her essays have been recognized as notable by Best American Essays. In her transdisciplinary practice, she works back and forth over membranes of genre and media, channeling text-based works into sonic, tactile, visual, and durational installations. In doing so, she seeks to expand the definition of literary art and where we expect to encounter it. Her mission is to free text-based works from pages and stages and to spark delight by interweaving literary art into the path of everyday public life. A Jack Straw Writer and Tin House alum, her work is supported by 4Culture, Centrum, City of Burien, Civita Institute, Invoking the Pause, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Marble House, Mineral School, Seattle Public Library, Shunpike, Vermont Studio Center, and Willapa Bay AIR. She resides on the ancestral lands and waters of the Dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish) and Bəqəlšuł (Muckleshoot) peoples.

Julia Gaskill (she/her) is a poet, organizer, and professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, OR. She’s competed multiple times on national spoken word stages and toured with her poetry across North America. Her work has been published through Moria Magazine, Pine Row Press, Vagabond City Lit, and more, as well as in several poetry anthologies. A Best of the Net nominated artist, Julia has run the poetry mic Slamlandia since 2018, co-created the Bigfoot Poetry Festival in 2019, and she was elected to the board of the Oregon Poetry Association in 2024. Her debut full length collection, ‘weirdo’, was published through Game Over Books in 2022. Find more about her at @geekgirlgrownup.

Atina Hartunian, a first-generation Armenian-American writer, earned her MFA from Pacific University in 2023. She received a Teaching Fellowship from Anaphora Arts (2024), a Pacific University MFA Merit Scholarship (2021), and residencies from Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and Rockvale Writers’ Colony. She has led generative workshops using sensory-driven prompts and craft constraints and has given craft talks on aspects of the horror genre. She is currently developing a four-part Horror Lecture Series and has been invited to present from it at the Thunderdome Conference, The Writer’s Center, and CALYX Press events. Atina Hartunian writes literary cartoons—not the kind you’d find in The New Yorker. Her stories are more like animated cartoons, which makes sense when you grow up watching She-Ra and The Simpsons. Just read her work, and you’ll see. She is a native Los Angel-ian.

Tish Jones is a poet, emcee, and Hip Hop Theater artist from Saint Paul, MN, with a deep and resounding love for Black people. Her work explores themes of Black love, liberation, politics, and Afro-Futurism. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and abroad as a public performance artist committed to the power of narrative change through the arts. Her writing can be found in We Are Meant to Rise (University of Minnesota Press), A Moment of Silence (Tru Ruts and The Playwrights Center), the Minnesota Humanities Center’s anthology entitled, Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press) and more.

Margaret Juhae Lee is the author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History (Melville House), which was named a best book of 2024 by the San Francisco Chronicle. A former editor at The Nation magazine, she received a Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study fellowship and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korea Foundation. She attended the Tin House and Writer’s Hotel writing workshops and was awarded residences at Mesa Refuge, Anderson Center, Mineral School and Ragdale. Her articles and interviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, Writer’s Digest, and The Rumpus. She lives in Oakland with her family.

Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) won the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, Tin House, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. The winner of the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, she is the editor-in-chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a member of the She Who Has No Master(s) collective.

Dominica Phetteplace is a writer and math tutor. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, Copper Nickel, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, Zyzzyva, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship and support from MacDowell, Tin House and Djerassi.

Alina Pleskova is a Moscow-born, Philadelphia-based poet and editor. Her poetry collection, Toska (Deep Vellum) was a 2024 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been published by the American Poetry Review, The Poetry Foundation, Jewish Currents, The Poetry Project, b l u s h, swamp pink, the tiny, and more.

Jen Shin (she/they) is a Korean diasporic writer, baker, and mental health advocate with more than a decade in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia. They are currently at work on Bad Magic, a coming-of-age addiction memoir which examines how we return to our true selves after reality and illusion become one. A 2023 Periplus Fellow, she has received support from Anaphora Arts, Stove Works, and Tin House Summer Workshop. In 2021, she published Have You Received Previous Psychotherapy or Counseling? through zines + things, and her essays can be found in Provecho, The Rumpus, Memoir Magazine, and elsewhere. Based in Portland, they lead an annual food & writing workshop series called Feasting on Words, which has been funded by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and Fernland Studios.

Raena Shirali is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, GILT, was released by YesYes Books and won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Published by Black Lawrence Press in October 2022, her second book, summonings, won the 2021 Hudson Prize and was shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, Shirali is also the recipient of prizes and honors from PEN America, VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, & Cosmonauts Avenue. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She serves as Contributing Editor for swamp pink and lives in Philadelphia.

Danez Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of Bluff (2024), Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award; [insert] Boy (2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Smith is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, Voices of Our Nation (VONA), and elsewhere. They are a founding member of the multigenre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. Their writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks. In poetry slam, Smith is a 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and the reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Champion, and was on the 2014 championship team Sad Boy Supper Club. In 2014 they were the festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam, and were awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Her queer horror novelette Helen House was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle, an assistant fiction editor at Foglifter, and the former managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and others. Some of her culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She has held fellowships with Tin House and Lambda Literary.

Zelmira Stevens Vindas, born in 1999, is a queer Costa Rican-American writer and artist based in Portland, Oregon. She studied creative writing at Portland Community College, where she self published her two novellas, Love be with You, and Los Cuentos. When she isn’t writing, you can catch her dancing, painting, and going on adventures with her friends and chihuahua.

Holly Zhou is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from the California desert, the unceded territory of the Cahuilla and Mojave peoples. Holly’s poetry and prose have been published in Foglifter, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. They are the winner of the 2023 Death Rattle Penrose Poetry Prize and the 2024 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Prize. Holly enjoys thinking about strangeness, saunas, rock formations, and flight.