Johnston, Amanda: Amanda Johnston is the author of one poetry collection, Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press, 2017), and two chapbooks, GUAP (2014) and Lock & Key (2014). She is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and the founder of Torch Literary Arts. Johnston was a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate. She has received honors, fellowships, and grants from multiple foundations, including Cave Canem, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, American Short Fiction, Tasajillo, Hedgebrook, The Watermill Center, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. 

Smith, Clint: Clint Smith is a poet, writer, and scholar. He is the author of two poetry books, Above Ground (Little, Brown and Company, 2023) and Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016), as well as How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). His other poems and writings have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, the Harvard Educational Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and others. He currently works as a staff writer for The Atlantic. Smith has been honored with many awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction, the Stowe Prize, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalist, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book, being the National Poetry Slam winner, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, New America, the National Science Foundation, the Emerson Collective, and the Andrew W Mellon Foundation.

Baraka, Amiri: Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) was a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and music criticism. His first book of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), and his Obie Award–winning play Dutchman (1964) launched a five-decade career marked by sharp political and social critique on Black liberation, racism, and inequality. He founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press (1958), and later the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem (1965), helping to shape the Black Arts Movement. Author of more than 50 books, Baraka received honors from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the NEA, and awards including the PEN/Faulkner, the Langston Hughes Award, and two American Book Awards, including one for Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (2010). He taught at Columbia, Rutgers, and SUNY Stony Brook, where he was professor emeritus of Africana Studies. Baraka died in 2014. 

girmay, aracelis: aracelis girmay has published several poetry collections, including Teeth (2007), Kingdom Animalia (2011), and The Black Maria (2016), named a “Top Poetry Pick” by Publisher's Weekly, O Magazine, and Library Journal. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing (2005). Her most recent collection of poetry Green of All Heads (2025) was published by BOA Editions. Her work has led to honors in the forms of a 2011 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Award for Poetry in 2015.  Now, girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow and an Acentos board member who leads youth and community writing workshops in New York City, where she teaches at Hampshire College.

Dungy, Camille T.: Camille T. Dungy is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry: What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010),  winner of the American Book Award, Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), and Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy is also the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Colorado Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award Nominations, and fellowships from the NEA in both poetry and prose. She is also a two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award, in 2010 and 2011, and a Silver Medal Winner of the California Book Award. She is currently a University Distinguished Professor in the English department of Colorado State University.

Young, Kevin: Kevin Young is the author of 16 books of poetry and prose, some of the most notable being: Stones (Jonathan Cape, 2021), a finalist for the T.S. Elliot Prize; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award; For the Confederate Dead (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), winner of the Quill Award in Poetry, and the Patterson Award for Sustained Literary Excellence; and Book of Hours (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award, as well as the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His most recent collection is Night Watch (2025). He is currently the poetry editor at the New Yorker. Young’s other awards and honors include a Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, a Thomas Wolfe Prize, a Harvard Arts Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellow Award, as well as being a Georgia Writers Hall of Fame Inductee. 

Siebles, Tim: Tim Seibles’ career as a poet spans over 4 decades.  He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy Gurdy (1992), Fast Animal (2012), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and his most recent work, Voodoo Libretto (2022).  His poems have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry.  He has taught at Cave Canem, the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, and at Old Dominion University, where he is a professor emeritus of English.  Over the course of his career, Seibles earned a 1990 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2012 National Book Award nomination, won the 2012 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and the 2013 PEN Open/Josephine Miles Award, among other recognitions.  From 2016-2018, he served as the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Furious Flower awarded Siebles with the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024.

Kaufman, Bob: Bob Kaufman was a jazz-inspired street poet whose oral poetry made him a central figure in the Beat movement. He proclaimed his poetry in coffee houses and on the streets, seldom writing them down. City Lights Bookstore were the first to publish his poems as three broadsides, Abomunist Manifesto (1959), Second April (1959), and Does the Secret Mind Whisper? (1960). His first and most well-known collection is Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965).  He later wrote two more books, The Golden Sardine (1967), and The Ancient Rain (1981).   Much of his work is anthologized in Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman (1996).