Elizabeth Smith is a writer, teacher, and printmaker living in Brooklyn, just north of the hippest neighborhood in the United States. A graduate from art school, she alternated between writing and visual art for many

Father Joseph Healey, M.M. is an American Maryknoll missionary priest who has lived in East Africa since 1968 and presently is based in Nairobi, Kenya . He is a trained journalist and now mainly a

Chris Grillo is a graduate of the New School MFA Creative Writing Program and is currently adjusting to life as a suburban dad. He lives in Rockland County, New York, with his wife and daughters,

Shelley Marlow is a writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn. In Marlow’s first New Narrative novel, Lesbians of Arabia aka Swann in Love Again in the Lesbian Arabian Nights underscores the inner journey as

Samuel Munene is a young Nairobi poet, short story writer, and contributor to Kwani? as well as various literary online magazines. He holds an economics degree from the University of Nairobi, and currently earns a

Gregory Pardlo is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received additional fellowships from the New York Times,

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. His new novel, Tetched (meaning “touched in the head”), has been printed by Behler Publications. His

Christopher Castellani holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University, a BA in English from Swarthmore College, and is ABD in English Literature at Tufts. His first novel, A Kiss from Maddalena, (Algonquin, 2003)

Annabel Smith was born and raised in England and educated at the London School of Economics, twice, and Oxford. She has taught high school history, politics, human rights and global studies for nearly twenty years