The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree is the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards. Fruit of the Drunken Tree was an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Camargo Foundation, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the Writer’s Grotto. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.

Tracey Baptiste is the New York Times bestselling author of Minecraft: The Crash. She is also the author of the popular Jumbies series including The Jumbies, Rise of the Jumbies, and The Jumbies God’s Revenge. She has written several other fiction and nonfiction books for children.

Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning novelist, game designer, computer game designer, graphic novelist, screenwriter and podcaster. He's had over fifty novels published, including the New York Times Bestselling I, Jedi and Rogue Squadron.

Cristina García is the author of seven novels: Here in Berlin; King of Cuba; The Lady Matador’s Hotel; A Handbook to Luck; Monkey Hunting; The Agüero Sisters, winner of the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize; and Dreaming in Cuban, finalist for the National Book Award. García has edited two anthologies, Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature and Cubaní simo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature. She is also the author of three works for young readers, Dreams of Significant Girls; The Dog Who Loved the Moon; and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010.

Justin Petropoulos is the author of two collections of poetry, Eminent Domain (Marsh Hawk Press 2011), selected by Anne Waldman for the 2010 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and <legend> </legend> (Jaded Ibis Press 2013), a collaborative work with multimedia artist, Carla Gannis. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Columbia Poetry Review, Mandorla, among others, and have been included in the anthologies Devouring the Green: Fear of a Human Planet (Jaded Ibis Press 2015) and The &NOW Awards 3 (Lake Forest College Press 2015). He is currently the program manager for Arizona State University’s Creative Writing Program.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of three collections of poetry, Dissolve, Flood Song, and Shapeshift. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and the PEN Book Award. His poems have appeared in Narrative, Black Renaissance Noir, American Poet, The Iowa Review, LIT, and elsewhere. He is Diné of the Todí­ch’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizí­laaní­ (Many Goats Clan), and has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Native Arts & Culture Foundation.

An Organization for Writers, Readers, and Fans of Crime Fiction and Mystery

Our Chapter is a proud member of Sisters in Crime, an international organization that promotes the ongoing advancement, recognition and professional development of women crime writers to achieve equality in the industry, raising professionalism, serving as the voice for excellence and achieving diversity in crime writing. 

The Sisters in Crime Desert Sleuths Chapter is located in the Phoenix Metropolitan area and serves members throughout the State of Arizona. Our members include bestselling, award-winning authors as well as emerging writers, fans of mysteries and crime stories, and other genres. We are an inclusive organization - whatever your gender, level of experience, or genre, you are welcome to join us.

Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is the author of eleven books and chapbooks of poetry, including The Theater of Night—winner of the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award—three collections of short stories, and a memoir about growing up on the border, Capirotada. His book The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body was a finalist for the National Book Award.   Ríos is the recipient of numerous accolades and his work is included in over 300 national and international literary anthologies.  He is also the host of the PBS program Books & Co. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music. Ríos is a University Professor of Letters, Regents’ Professor, and the Katharine C. Turner Chair in English at Arizona State University. His most recent book is A Small Story About the Sky.

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of both rinky dink press and The Revolution (Relaunch), a creative revisioning of the weekly women’s rights newspaper founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1868. Her collections include The Book of Emergencies (2014), The Philosophy of Unclean Things (2017), and The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition. She’s the recipient of a 2017 Arts Hero Award, the Carrie McCray Award in Nonfiction (2017), a fellowship from the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, five Pushcart nominations, and a Whiting Fellowship nomination (2019). Her poem, “Atypical” was named a finalist for the Brooklyn Poets Whitman Bicentennial Poetry Contest.

Ivelisse Rodriguez’s debut short story collection is Love War Stories (Feminist Press, 2018), a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. She is the founder and editor of an interview series focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She currently lives in NC with her beloved Lhasa Apso, Chocolatte Rodriguez. To learn more about Rodriguez, visit: www.ivelisserodriguez.com.

Claudia Nuñez de Ibieta translates, interprets, and occasionally still teaches Spanish and English, in Tempe, Arizona. A student of history (B.A. ASU), translation of historiography is a favorite, with published translations for the Academy of American Franciscan History. Also a bookseller at her local independent bookstore in Tempe for over 10 years and founding member of the bookstore’s fifteen-year-old Spanish language literary bookgroup, “ La Tertulia” , Claudia very much enjoys reading in both languages, as well as making bilingual books of poetry with Phoenix’s Cartonera Collective since 2018. This has led to developing her own project of poetic translation, with aspirations to publish, and to small incursions in sharing her writing, with pieces in inaugural issues of City of Tempe’s Orbit Playlist, little something’s press, and Palabrona Zine, vol.1.

Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of a novel, A River of Stars, a national bestseller and best books pick by NPR and the Washington Post, and a short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities. For two decades, she has been writing about Asia and the diaspora. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists’ Association. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. A Bay Area native, she works and teaches at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

Denise Ganley is a graduate of the Your Novel Year program from Arizona State University’s Piper Center for Creative Writing and has a Certificate in Creative Writing from Phoenix College. Her supernatural short story THE RELIC EXPERT placed as a semifinalist in the 2011 Faulkner Wisdom Contest and with Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest 80th Annual Writing Competition (Mainstream/Literary Category). Denise writes inclusive, cross-genre stories. She is the host of The Heart-Shaped Books Podcast and the 2020 Board President of Sisters in Crime Desert Sleuths Chapter. Find her at DeniseGanley.com

Andrea Avery is the author of Sonata: A Memoir of Pain and the Piano, which describes her experiences growing up as an aspiring pianist even after a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis at age 12. Her writing has been published in Ploughshares, Real Simple, The Oxford American, and The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior. She was the winner of Real Simple’s 2010 essay contest and a finalist in Glamour magazine’s essay contest. She holds a BA in music, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a doctorate in education from Arizona State University. She teaches English at Phoenix Country Day School and is an active volunteer with the Arthritis Foundation.

Kay Ulanday Barrett aka @brownroundboi, is a poet, performer, and educator, navigating life as a disabled pilipinx amerikan transgender queer in the U.S. K. has featured globally; Princeton University, UC Berkeley, The Lincoln Center, Queens Museum, The Chicago Historical Society, NY Poetry Festival, Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, & National Queer Arts Festival. They are a 3x Pushcart Prize nominee and has received fellowships from Lambda Literary Review, VONA/Voices, The Home School, and Drunken Boat. Their contributions are found in Asian American Literary Review, PBS News Hour, NYLON, The Margins, RaceForward, Foglifter, The Deaf Poets Society, Poor Magazine, Fusion.net, Trans Bodies/Trans Selves, Winter Tangerine, Apogee, Entropy, Colorlines, Everyday Feminism, Them., The Advocate, and Bitch Magazine. They have contributions in the anthologies, Subject To Change (Sibling Rivalry Press), Outside the XY: Queer Black & Brown Masculinity (Magnus Books), and Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Trans-genre Press). They are currently a guest editor at Nat.Brut, 2018 Lambda Literary Review, Writer-In-Residence in Poetry, and 2018 guest faculty for The Poetry Foundation & Crescendo Literary. When The Chant Comes (Topside Press, 2016) is their first collection of poetry. kaybarrett.net

Bruce Owens Grimm writes haunted queer essays and memoir. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Kenyon Review Online, Ninth Letter, AWP’s Writer’s Notebook, Iron Horse Literary Review, Older Queer Voices, and elsewhere. He is co-editing Fat & Queer, an anthology inspired by his Fat and Queer series for Queen Mob’s Tea House. More can be found at www.bruceowensgrimm.com.

Laura Tohe is Diné of the Sleepy Rock People clan and is the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate for 2017-2019. A librettist and an award-winning poet, her books include No Parole Today, Making Friends with Water, Sister Nations, Tséyi, Deep in the Rock, and Code Talker Stories.  Her commissioned librettos are Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio, for the Phoenix Symphony on the Naxos Classical Music label and Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World for Opera de Rouen made its world premiere in 2019 in France.  She writes essays, stories, and a children’s play that have appeared in the U.S., Canada, and Europe with French, Dutch and Italian translations.  She is the recipient of the 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers’s Award, Joy Harjo & the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Award, the Dan Schilling Public Scholar Award and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Award.

Peter Twal is a Jordanian American, an electrical engineer, and the author of Our Earliest Tattoos, winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize (University of Arkansas Press). His poems have appeared in The Believer, Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, West Branch Wired, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter Online, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Twal earned his MFA at the University of Notre Dame, where he was awarded the Samuel and Mary Anne Hazo Poetry Award for his work. He lives in Phoenix, AZ with his wife and son. 

Jonathan Danielson is an Instructor with Writing Programs and Affiliate Faculty member with Creative Writing. In 2017 he was named Writer-at-Large (“Desert Correspondent”) for Feathertale Review, and his work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Juked, Superstition Review, Gravel, Able Muse, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. His story "Borders" was the recipient of the 2016 Editor’s Prize from Switchback. Along with his full-time teaching duties at ASU, Jonathan is pursing a doctorate in English literature with a creative emphasis. He received his MFA from the University of San Francisco. 

Alberto Álvaro Ríos, born in 1952 in Nogales, Arizona, is the author of eleven books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir.  His books of poems include The Dangerous Shirt, The Theater of Night, winner of the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, along with The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, a finalist for the National Book Award, Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, The Lime Orchard Woman, The Warrington Poems, Five Indiscretions, and Whispering to Fool the Wind, winner of the Walt Whitman Award.  His three collections of short stories are, most recently, The Curtain of Trees, along with Pig Cookies and The Iguana Killer.  His memoir about growing up on the Mexico-Arizona border—called Capirotada—won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award and was recently chosen as the OneBookArizona selection.

Ríos is host of the Eight, Arizona PBS ground-breaking original production Books & Co., now in its 22nd year on-air, where he provides viewers exclusive access to renowned authors and fresh faces on the literary scene, in intimate conversations with writers offering an unparalleled exploration into the heart and creative process of contemporary literature.

Recently honored with the University of Arizona Outstanding Alumnus Award, Ríos is the recipient of the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, and inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, as well as over 300 other national and international literary anthologies.  His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music. 

Ríos is a Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, where he has taught for over 35 years and where he holds the further distinctions of the Katharine C. Turner Endowed Chair in English and University Professor of Letters. He is Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate and is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Peggy Robles- Alvarado is Pushcart Prize nominee, a CantoMundo fellow, Academy for Teachers and Home School fellow and a five-time International Latino Book Award winner.  This tenured educator, with M.A.Ed. degrees in elementary and bilingual education and an MFA in Performance Studies is the author of Conversations with My Skin (2011) and Homage to the Warrior Women (2012). Through Robleswrites Productions, she curated The Abuela Stories Project (2016) and Mujeres, The Magic, The Movement and The Muse (2017). As an initiated priestess in the Lukumi and Palo spiritual systems, this BRIO award-winning performance poet uses rhythmic, raw- truth energy to celebrate womanhood and honor cultural rituals. She’s been featured on HBO Habla Women, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, The Black Spirit Solstice Summit, Poets & Writers, and The BADD!ASS Women Festival. Robles-Alvarado also directed sold-out performances of her latest anthology and the poetic play Live Big Girl. For more information visit Robleswrites.com.

Saretta Morgan is a writer and artist who uses text and objects to consider relationships between privacy and narrative forms. She is the author of the chapbooks, Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017) as well as a forthcoming full length collection Plan Upon Arrival (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour). She was a 2016-2017 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident and has created interactive text-based projects for art institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dia Beacon. Her work has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, among others. Saretta received a B.A. in writing from Columbia University and an MFA from Pratt Institute. She teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Sharon Skinner holds a GPC, a BA in English, an MA in Creative Writing, and a poetic license. She currently writes for all ages. Her published works include picture books, middle grade, ya, and adult novels. Her rhyming picture book, Rocket Shoes, was selected for the 2018 Leaping Lizard Club Top Ten Read Aloud list. Sharon is an active member of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) and serves as the Regional Advisor for SCBWI AZ. You can find out more about Sharon online at www.sharonskinner.com

Andrew Dana Hudson is an award-winning speculative fiction writer. His fiction won the Imagination and Climate Futures Climate Fiction Contest, was runner up in the Writing the Future health sci-fi contest, and has appeared in Terraform, Little Blue Marble with work forthcoming in Slate Future Tense and LIGHTSPEED magazine He studies sustainability at ASU and is a fellow in the Imaginary College at the Center for Science and the Imagination. His nonfiction writing has appeared in Slate, among others. He serves as associate editor of Oasis, a Phoenix-based journal of anticapitalist thought.

Juhea Kim was born in In Cheon, Korea, and moved to Portland, Oregon, at age nine. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Art and Archaeology and a certificate in French. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, Slice, Zyzzyva, Times Literary Supplement and Catapult. Her translation of Lee Sang Award-winning author Choi In-Ho was published in Granta. She is the founder and editor of Peaceful Dumpling, an online magazine covering sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature, and has freelanced for Vogue, Sierra Magazine, Huffington Post, and MarthaStewart.com. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and Regional Arts & Culture Council. She is represented by Brandt & Hochman Literary Agency. 

Sara Fujimura writes for teens and the young at heart. She is the American half of her Japanese-American family and spends about a month each summer in rural Japan with her children. So it’s no surprise she’s written about Japanese culture and raising bicultural kids for such magazines as LEARNING THROUGH HISTORY and MOTHERING, as well as, writing travel-related articles for the book TO JAPAN WITH LOVE. Her award-winning YA contemporary novel TANABATA WISH is set in Nagoya, Japan. Her second book BREATHE is YA historical fiction set in 1918 Philadelphia against the Spanish Flu pandemic. EVERY REASON WE SHOULDN’T, also YA contemporary, launches March 2020 with Tor Teen is for fans of THE CUTTING EDGE and YURI ON ICE. Sara is a creative writing teacher, a literacy advocate, and is excited to support the next generation of authors. www.sarafujimura.com

Cristina García is the author of seven novels: Here in Berlin; King of Cuba; The Lady Matador’s Hotel; A Handbook to Luck; Monkey Hunting; The Agüero Sisters, winner of the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize; and Dreaming in Cuban, finalist for the National Book Award. García has edited two anthologies, Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature and Cubaní simo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature. She is also the author of three works for young readers, Dreams of Significant Girls; The Dog Who Loved the Moon; and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010.

Judith Starkston writes historical fantasy set in the Bronze Age world of Hittites and Greeks. She holds degrees in Classics, from University of California, Santa Cruz (BA) and Cornell University (MA). She taught high-school English, Latin and humanities. Her debut novel, Hand of Fire, was a semi-finalist for the prestigious M.M. Bennett’s Award for Historical Fiction. Her second novel, Priestess of Ishana won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. She is represented by Richard Curtis.

Michael Hale has over 30 years of experience as a Creative Director, entrepreneur, writer and Illustrator. He has illustrated many picture books and written two himself. His book, Bad Monkey Business was awarded a Spark Honor by SCBWI in 2018. He also serves as the Illustrator Coordinator for SCBWI’s Arizona Region. When he is not writing or illustrating, he devotes his time to coaching others looking to forge their own path in children’s publishing. You can see more of his work by visiting www.michaelhale.me

tanner menard is a Q2S, non-binary poet & composer whose work embodies their Creole/Acadian/NDN lineage. Poems are their method of survival, a linguistic medicine of ambiguity which is certain that love prevails. As a composer of experimental music, menard has been published & anthologized internationally on labels such as Full Spectrum Records, Rural Colours, Tokyo Droning, Install, Slow Flow Rec, H.L.M., Archaic Horizon, Kafua Records & Milieu Music. Their recent album/chapbook collaboration with Andrew Weathers was published on Full Spectrum Records. menard’s poetry & essays have been published in The Squawkback, Rabbit & Rose, Cloudthroat, The University of Arizona Poetry Center Blog, Red Ink Magazine, The Mockingheart Review, American Indian Culture and Research Journal at UCLA & The Wire Magazine. Forthcoming poems will appear in Hunger Mountain, Beestung, Wend Poetry & Hayden’s Ferry Review. Their poems ‘see eye my memory my’ & ‘Excerpts from Preludes & Flux’ were nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Cloudthroat & Hayden’s Ferry Review. menard is a member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Southwest Louisiana & Southeast Texas & resides in Tempe, AZ. They work as a community organizer for Equality Arizona.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She has received awards from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and Artist Trust, among other places. She has taught at the New York University, Fordham University, and Sierra Nevada College, and she serves as executive director at Kundiman.

Reyes Ramirez is a Houstonian. Ramirez won the 2019 YES Contemporary Art Writer’s Grant, 2017 Blue Mesa Review Nonfiction Contest, 2014 riverSedge Poetry Prize and has poems, stories, essays, and reviews (and/or forthcoming) in: Cosmonauts Avenue, The Latinx Archive, december magazine, Houston Noir, Gulf Coast Journal, The Acentos Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. Ramirez has been awarded grants from the Houston Arts Alliance and The Warhol Foundation’s Idea Fund. You can read more of his work at: reyesvramirez.com.

Laura Tohe is Diné of the Sleepy Rock People clan and is the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate for 2017-2019. A librettist and an award-winning poet, her books include No Parole Today, Making Friends with Water, Sister Nations, Tséyi, Deep in the Rock, and Code Talker Stories.  Her commissioned librettos are Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio, for the Phoenix Symphony on the Naxos Classical Music label and Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World for Opera de Rouen made its world premiere in 2019 in France.  She writes essays, stories, and a children’s play that have appeared in the U.S., Canada, and Europe with French, Dutch and Italian translations.  She is the recipient of the 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers’s Award, Joy Harjo & the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Award, the Dan Schilling Public Scholar Award and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Award.

Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning novelist, game designer, computer game designer, graphic novelist, screenwriter and podcaster. He's had over fifty novels published, including the New York Times Bestselling I, Jedi and Rogue Squadron.

A native of Los Angeles, California, Kirby Kim attended Pomona College and got his JD at UC Hastings College of the Law. Kim got his first job in publishing working for Charlotte Sheedy Literary, at that time an affiliate of Sterling Lord Literistic, then moved to Vigliano Associates and WME before joining Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Kim represents both literary and commercial authors. He’s most interested in receiving manuscripts that straddle the fence a bit, with upmarket expression combined with a genre element or plot device. When it comes to straight literary work, he’s alternatively drawn to rich, sweeping stories that try to encompass a time or a place or tightly written, narratively innovative stories or voices with award potential. His commercial interests include thrillers and mysteries, speculative fiction, and young adult. He also represents a range of nonfiction working with leaders and journalists in the areas of science, culture and current affairs.

Kim is currently a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife and two kids.

Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of a novel, A River of Stars, a national bestseller and best books pick by NPR and the Washington Post, and a short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities. For two decades, she has been writing about Asia and the diaspora. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists’ Association. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. A Bay Area native, she works and teaches at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha (forthcoming from Omnidawn, 2020), winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. He is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Boiler, ctrl + v journal, Tinderbox, among other journals. Cody is a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle where he co-edited How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. As an MFA candidate at Fresno State, he serves as a fellow in the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio created by Juan Felipe Herrera. In 2018, he received the Galway Kinnell Scholarship to attend the Community of Writers and nominations for a Best of the Net and a Best New Poets 2018 via The Boiler. He is the communications manager for CantoMundo, as well as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press.

Justin Noga is a fiction writer from Akron, Ohio, and is a second-year MFA student at Arizona State University. He teaches composition and creative writing at ASU, taught for the Piper Writers Studio at the Virginia G Piper Center for Creative Writing in Summer 2018, and was the recipient of the 2018 Virginia G. Piper Global Teaching Fellowship for the National University of Singapore. His work has been published in Conjunctions. He lives with a whippet/terrier with a Napoleon complex.

The Office for Veteran and Military Academic Engagement serves the Arizona State University community by promoting dialogue, teaching, and research that increases information, understanding, knowledge, and relationships among military, civilian, and academic cultures.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015). She has won fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, CantoMundo, and was a 2018 Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Originally from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, she teaches Latina/o Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma Washington.

Lorin Drexler is an American poet, fiction writer, musician, songwriter, and music producer. Currently residing in Phoenix, Arizona, and originally from the windy city of Chicago, he graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a bachelor's degree in creative writing. His work has appeared in tNY Press, LitroNY, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Black Elephant, and Maudlin House. Lorin was also an awarded recipient in the 2019 Tempe Writing Contest.

Justin Noga is a fiction writer from Akron, Ohio, and is a second-year MFA student at Arizona State University. He teaches composition and creative writing at ASU, taught for the Piper Writers Studio at the Virginia G Piper Center for Creative Writing in Summer 2018, and was the recipient of the 2018 Virginia G. Piper Global Teaching Fellowship for the National University of Singapore. His work has been published in Conjunctions. He lives with a whippet/terrier with a Napoleon complex.

Piper J. Daniels (she/ her) is a Michigan native and queer intersectional feminist currently living in the American Southwest. She received a BA from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA from University of Washington. Her debut essay collection, Ladies Lazarus, won the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, was longlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award For the Art of the Essay, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction. Entropy named Ladies Lazarus one of their favorite books of 2018. Daniels’s work appears in Hotel Amerika, The Rumpus, Tarpaulin Sky, Entropy, Longreads, and elsewhere. She works as a full-time writer and manuscript consultant to the curious and the brave.

Peter Twal is a Jordanian American, an electrical engineer, and the author of Our Earliest Tattoos, winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize (University of Arkansas Press). His poems have appeared in The Believer, Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, West Branch Wired, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter Online, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Twal earned his MFA at the University of Notre Dame, where he was awarded the Samuel and Mary Anne Hazo Poetry Award for his work. He lives in Phoenix, AZ with his wife and son. 

Rogelio Juárez is a Phoenix-based writer, a graduate of the VONA/Voices of Our Nation and Tin House workshops, a grandson of Braceros and son of an immigrant and a marine. His writing can be found in J Journal: New Writing on Justice, The James Franco Review, and Zócalo Public Square.

Sally Ball is the author of three collections of poems, Hold Sway, Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis. An associate professor of English at Arizona State University, Ball is also an associate director of Four Way Books. She has been with the press for 23 of its 26 years. She has received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CAMAC Centre d’Art, and elsewhere. Her long poem “HOLD” has been made into a large-format artist’s book by the Czech printmaker Jan Vičar (2018) and will be featured at an exhibit at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris in December 2019.

Tracey Baptiste is the New York Times bestselling author of Minecraft: The Crash. She is also the author of the popular Jumbies series including The Jumbies, Rise of the Jumbies, and The Jumbies God’s Revenge. She has written several other fiction and nonfiction books for children.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015). She has won fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, CantoMundo, and was a 2018 Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Originally from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, she teaches Latina/o Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma Washington.

Ilana Luna is Associate professor of Latin American Studies and Spanish at Arizona State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in literary translation (2011). (M.A. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006; B.A. Bryn Mawr College, 2001). At ASU she teaches on Latin American film, literature in Spanish and in translation, and Latin America Cultural Studies. She author of the book Adapting Gender: Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film (SUNY Press, 2018) that considers the subversive potential of film adaptation of literary texts that intersect with feminist discourses in a neoliberal Mexico. She is the Director of Programming for the international film Femme Revolution Film Fest in Mexico City, and a writer and translator of poetry and prose. You can find some of her work in the journals Jacket2, Hostos Review, Askew, Four Chambers Press, Oomph!, Barzakh, Hektoen International, Vice Versa, and Contrapuntos. She has translated Juan José Rodinás’s Koan: Underwater (Cardboard House Press, 2018),  Judith Santopietro’s Tiawanaku: Poems from the Madre Coqa (Orca Libros) and Giancarlo Huapaya’s Sub Verse Workshop (Lavender Ink/ Diálogos)