Oereishi Aeoma is a multidisciplinary poet and storyteller dedicated to healing and planetary upliftment. In 2024, he published Being, a book of poetry, and Bird Band, a work of fiction. Recently, he was a featured storyteller at RI Black Storytellers Funda Fest and his art was included in the We All Live Here Together exhibition at the Providence Public Library. He is dreaming a harmonious, re-forested earth into existence.

Michael Ahern is a Providence-residing filmmaker, screenwriter, and community organizer. His work often details LGBTQ+ experiences, specifically those on the fringes of the community. He co-founded Monster Makeup Productions, a small, queer filmmaking collective in Rhode Island. His most recent work, the feature screenplay Apartment Story, was a finalist for a Bellem Entertainment Scholarship through Stowe Story Labs. He works full time as a Grant Writer for the art nonprofit AS220.

Afua Ansong is the author of three chapbooks: Black Ballad (Bull City Press, 2022), Try Kissing God (Akashic, 2020), and American Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her writings have appeared in the Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, Four Way Review, Maine Review, and other journals. She is the founder of The Adinkra Projects which provides poetry workshops and supports emerging Ghanaian writers, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island.

Elise Dietrich is a multi-passionate artist and educator. Following an academic career in Brazilian cultural studies and Portuguese language, Elise began writing and drawing autobiographical comics in 2017. She has published a range of minicomics and zines, and is working on a graphic novel about her years teaching and traveling in Brazil. She teaches cartooning online through the Sequential Artists Workshop, and hosts the monthly Drink & Draw event at the Riffraff bookstore.

Kathryn Kulpa lives where Massachusetts meets Rhode Island and writes where poetry meets prose, specializing in flash and micro fiction. She is a flash fiction editor at Cleaver magazine, where she teaches writing workshops, and is the author of For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press) and A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press). Her work has been chosen for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Wigleaf longlist. Find her at kathrynkulpa.com.

Fallon Masterson is the co-founder and producer of Stranger Stories PVD, a reading series dedicated to personal essays and memoir in Rhode Island. She was named Best Personal Storyteller by Motif Magazine in 2023 and Stranger Stories was named Best Storytelling Event by Rhode Island Monthly magazine in 2024. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Non-Fiction at Lesley University.

Amanda Boyanowski-Morin is a writer and reader, parent and partner, knitter and service dog handler. Their work mainly focuses on the disability, place, and nature. Amanda can be found in vernal pools or sitting on mossy logs.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen works in her hometown library as Head of the Reference department. Her poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Magma, Orbis, Crannóg, Eclectica Magazine and American Arts Quarterly, among others. She won the 2017 Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Portugal, was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland, and was accepted into Marge Piercy’s Summer Poetry Intensive in Wellfleet. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.

Melissa Rosa deMedeiros Spurr is a first generation Rhode Islander of Azorean descent. Her work largely explores the isolation, melancholy, and empowerment that comes from lives lived clinging to a volcano in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Her current body of work explores her matrilineal lineage, handed-down oral lore of their origins, and flirts with attempting to answer mysteries suppressed and erased.