Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer who is at work on a memoir about healing from childhood trauma and family estrangement. In 2024, she was a New York State Council on the Arts grantee in literature and a nonfiction juror for The Kirkus Prize. Hannah was the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2022 and 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and a 2019 fellow at Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Follow her on Instagram at @hannahbae.

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Dr. Bill Releford, is a distinguished podiatric surgeon specializing in amputation prevention and limb preservation in high-risk populations, both domestically and internationally. With over 36 years of experience, Dr. Bill Releford has dedicated his career to addressing health disparities and improving outcomes for vulnerable communities.  His impact extends far beyond the United States. Dr. Releford has led and participated in healthcare projects across East and West Africa, Central America, South America, and the South Pacific Islands—bringing advanced limb preservation techniques and community health strategies to regions most in need. As the owner of Bloom Ranch of Acton—the largest Black-owned farm in Los Angeles County—Dr. Releford has created a unique bridge between medicine, agriculture, and community empowerment. He is the founder of the Black Barbershop Health Outreach Program, which has screened over 30,000 men in Black-owned barbershops nationwide, and the author of Five Colors a Day to Better Health, a book that champions the philosophy that “your plate should look like a flower, bursting with color.”

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Hasanthika Sirisena is a writer, visual artist, and cartoonist living in Central PA. Her work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021). ​​​​​​​​

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Irene Theotokatou is an actor-director, writer, poet and artist. She studied in South Africa and the UK and has an MA in Theatre Studies. Since returning to Greece, she co-founded Sirens, a bilingual theatre company that created and performed work on relevant issues. For many years, she taught acting, voice and mask work. She studied voice with the Roy Hart Theatre and Frankie Armstrong. Her commitment is to a theatre that challenges and empowers both the audience and the practitioners. Her poetry and short fiction often focuses on the retelling of Ancient Greek myths.

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015), as well as the collaboratively written chapbooks: I Wear a Top Hat When I Go Into the Forest (Ghost City Press, 2025) and The Box We Put the World in to Keep a Corner From Shattering (Aureole Press, 2025). His honors include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for poetry, a Best New Poets award, a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, and writing awards from Columbia Journal (poetry) and The Florida Review (creative nonfiction). His poetry appears widely in literary magazines such as 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and West Branch. His creative nonfiction appears in American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Southeast Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, and Colorado Review. Christopher has taught at the University of Kansas, Indiana University, Kettle Pond Writers' Conference, the State University of New York at Oswego, the Downtown Writers Center of Central New York, and the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. He is an Editorial Assistant for the Seneca Review and lives and teaches in sunny Syracuse, New York.