Eirinie Carson is an award-winning Black British writer and college dropout living in California. She writes about sexual taboos, death and dying, illegal substances, hauntings both real and imagined, and ancestral inheritance in a world desperate to sever the connections between what came before and what is to come. Her work has appeared in LitHub, the Notre Dame Review, Electric Literature, the Sonora Review, the Los Angeles Review, The Unibrow, and other venues. Her first work of fiction, the maternal gothic novel, Bloodfire, Baby (Dutton, 2026), has been named one of the year’s best debuts by Debutiful. Eirinie’s first book, the memoir The Dead Are Gods (Melville House, 2023), was critically acclaimed in Oprah Daily, Nylon, Shondaland, and the Washington Post, and was named one of the year’s best books by Kirkus Reviews.

Laleh Khadivi is the author of four novels, including The Age of Orphans, which received a Whiting Writers' Award; The Walking; A Good Country, a New York Times Editors' Choice; and Female Life on Planet Earth, forthcoming in 2026. Her essays, stories, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, LA Times, McSweeney's and Lithub among others. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Stein Fellowship at Stanford University, and a John Felice Fellowship in Rome. A former documentary filmmaker, she has taught and spoken at universities and literary festivals across the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Born in Esfahan, Iran, she works now as an Associate Professor and Chair of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and lives in the Bay Area with her excellent family and two very good dogs.

Lexi Pandell is a journalist and author of fiction from Oakland, CA. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was the winner of the Editors’ Prize in Fiction from New Ohio Review. Her debut memoir Holy Mother! will be published in 2027.

Photo credit: Emily Merrill

Samantha Stevens (she/they) is a queer, Black, disabled writer and educator from the East Coast who has called The Bay home since 2019. They have received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Community of Writers, Trillium Arts, Esperimento Sul Respiro, The Ruby, Kearny Street Workshop, and The Loft and are a graduate of the MFA in Poetry at the University of San Francisco. They are the recipient of the 2022 Deathrattle/Oroboro Penrose Poetry Prize. Their work is featured or forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Seventh Wave, Foglifter, and Fruitslice. Their first manuscript was a finalist for the 2025 CAAPP book prize.

Lisa Teasley is the author of the acclaimed novels Dive and Heat Signature, and the award-winning story collection, Glow in the Dark, published by Bloomsbury. Her most recent is the story collection Fluid published by Cune Press. Lisa is the librettist of the coming 2026 world premiere Long Beach Opera The Passion of Nell as well as the writer/presenter of the BBC television documentary “High School Prom.” Her essays, stories and poems have been much anthologized, including in WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America and Europa Editions’ The Passenger California.  Her writings have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Swedish, Chinese and Arabic. Lisa was the senior fiction editor for Los Angeles Review of Books and has taught in numerous MFA writing programs including Cal Arts and UC Riverside, as well as having taught master writing classes around the world in countries such as Nigeria, Indonesia and China. As a much-exhibited visual artist, her coming solo show is February-March 2026 at the Offus gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Lisa lives in Mendocino County.

Photo credit: Irwin Miller

T.S. Leonard is a poet, performer, and educator whose work has been featured in Poetry, Foglifter, and Fourteen Poems and in collaborative projects at the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Design Center. Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, winner of the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, is his debut collection. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.

Linda Michel-Cassidy’s story collection, When We Were Hardcore (EastOver Press) was named to the longlist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for debut story collection, 2026. Her writing has appeared in December, Rattle, New Orleans Review, Tahoma Review, and elsewhere. She is senior reviews and hybrid/collaboration editor at Tupelo Quarterly. Michel-Cassidy lives on a houseboat and is a novice open-water swimmer.

D. A. Powell is the author of five collections, including Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. His honors include two Northern California Book Awards, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and the John Updike Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, Powell has taught at Stanford, Columbia, University of Texas at Austin, University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Davidson College. He is a Professor at University of San Francisco and lives in San Francisco.

Powell’s most recent book is Repast: Tea, Lunch & Cocktails, a reissue of his first three collections with an introduction by novelist David Leavitt. Three chapbooks have appeared in the last 6 years: Atlas T, published by Rescue Press in Spring of 2020, Low Hanging Fruit, printed by Foundlings Press in 2022, and Tricks, published by Cutbank Books in 2026.

Preeti Vangani is a poet & writer from Bombay based in San Francisco. She is the author of the poetry collections, Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers, (River River Books, 2026). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, among other places. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, YBCA, and is a current Steinbeck fellow. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.