As an Optimus Prime Trauma Transformer con lengua de machete, Liliana Conlisk Gallegos cannot help but experiment with EVERYTHING including art, technology, and all forms of media. With the goal of advancing the certain decolonial turn, her live, interactive media art production and rasquache performances generate culturally specific, collective, technocultural creative spaces of production that reconnect Chicana/o/x Indigenous mestiza wisdom and conocimiento to their ongoing technological and scientific contributions, still currently "overlooked" through the logic of the decaying Eurocentric project of Modernity. As a transfronteriza (perpetual border crosser), the current limited perceptions of what research, media, and technology can be and do are like a yonke (junkyard), from which pieces are upcycled and repurposed to amplify individual and collective expression, community healing, and social justice.

Alex Avila, a native New Yorker, hails from the Bronx, New York City. As a Black Latino Garifuna Honduran, Alex explores issues of identity and biculturalism in his works of prose and poetry. He is an MFA graduate specializing in multifarious prose performance, i.e., digital storytelling. He was accepted into the Iowa's Writers' Workshop, one of the top writing programs in the United States, where he studied advanced poetics. Author of eight books, English and Liberal Studies professor, co-founder of Black Scholars Matter, creator of College Career & Beyond and Parents-Are-Cool Podcast, Co-Founder of the Black Brown Economic Empowerment Partnership (the BEEP), public speaker, marketing specialists, and non-profit consultant. You can find more of his work at www.avilaproduction.com

John Perham was born in South Vietnam. He holds degrees from the University of California, Riverside, and Cal State San Bernardino. He currently teaches at Mt. San Jacinto College. His collection of poems features an array of approaches to the political turmoil that followed the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

Isidro Zepeda is a father to two beautiful children and husband to a wonderful woman. His family is his dream, vision, and focus. All creativity emerges from this fireplace. For Isidro, creativity is his nature. He has always created and had a profound need to create. Over the years, he has deleted, burned, or gifted (only to my family) mostly all his poetry, short stories, and artwork; however, during the pandemic he discovered a different purpose: to share perhaps at a much greater scale his expressions/interpretations of our shared realities.

Kimberly Ann Southwick-Thompson is the founder and editor in chief of Gigantic Sequins, a print literary arts journal. She is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in Creative Writing Poetry at Jacksonville State University. Her full-length poetry collection, Orchid Alpha, is forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press in 2021; it was a finalist over six times and a semi-finalist twice before getting picked up. Kimberly has been a featured reader at the Open Mouth Poetry Festival and Dogfish New Orleans Reading series. She currently lives in Saks, Alabama, with her husband, Geoffrey Thompson, their daughter, Esmé, and their two dogs, Jasper and Nova. Find out more at kimberlyannsouthwick.com or by following her on twitter, via @kimannjosouth.

Carly Creley is a painter and photographer from Los Feliz in Los Angeles, California. She holds masters degrees in Environmental Science and in Education and uses art to share her experiences in the natural world. Her work has been exhibited in galleries across Southern California and her artwork has been published widely in The Sand Canyon Review & The East Jasmine Review. Her scientific research on tree squirrels has been published in the Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences.

Scott Noon Creley holds an MFA in poetry from California State University, Long Beach, and a BA in writing from UC Riverside. He is a visiting professor of English at Whittier College and the founding chairman of The San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, which was established in 2012. His most recent collection, Digging a Hole to the Moon, debuted in the top 50 of Amazon.com’s poetry section.

Richard Pamatatau is a tenured academic at AUT University and a former journalist who worked on The DominionPost, the influential morning paper in New Zealand's capital Wellington, the NZ Herald in Auckland and latterly at the public broadcaster Radio New Zealand. He is known as a political commentator and sometime columnist who has poked the borax at the left and the right. He holds a Master of Creative Writing with First Class Honours from Auckland University and is making a change from teaching journalism as he pursues a PhD at Massey University in poetry.

Gretchen Bartels-Ray lives and writes in San Diego, California and is an associate professor of English at California Baptist University. Her research interests include Victorian literature, children's literature, and the Oxford Inklings. She also writes poetry and fiction. She has published in Literature and Theology, The Ekphrastic Review, KAIROS Literary Magazine, Sojourners, and Every Day Fiction.

Isadora Grevan is an Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She completed her PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University in 2013. She has been a recipient of several grants including a Fulbright Scholar award in 2016 and a NEH summer workshop grant in 2015. She currently teaches classes on Brazilian Literature and Culture in translation, Lusophone world Studies, Brazilian Theater and Latin American Literature. Her forthcoming book manuscript focuses on Modern Brazilian literature during the dictatorship.

Sandra Maresh Doe serves as Professor of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she has been employed since 1965. She published Trip and Return: Poems from 50 Years (Denver: First Cold Press, 2017). Her lifelong research on the artist Ray Boynton, she articulated in “The Fourth Wife: 13 Lines for Artist Ray Boynton (1883-1951).” Pacific Coast Philology. vol. 53, no. 2 2018, pp. 286-288. Recently, she served as poetry editor of Away to Santa Fe: A Collection of Santa Fe Trail Poems to recognize 200 years of trail travel, 1821-2021. (Santa Fe: New Mexico State Library, 2021). She still goes out on the trail to search for or write poems.

Jesse Fowler (he/him/his) is from New Jersey. He is the Drs. Lois Recascino Wise and Charles R. Wise O’Neill Public Management Fellow at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Bloomington. Fowler’s influences include Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them,” and Ernest Hemingway’s “[Blank Verse],” as well as Salvador Dalí’s Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).

Pat Gibbons is a poet, musician, student, and teacher. His poetry has appeared in Spindrift and Sketch. As a musician, he has released singles, EPs, and albums. He also records an NBA/pop culture themed podcast. He has attended Iowa State University and Indiana State University and is currently pursuing a Masters in English. Pat has also taught high school upperclass English courses (Literature and College Credit Advanced Comp.) for little over a decade, and also is in the process of seeking a publisher for his first poetry book titled, Irritants and Artifacts, debuting two of his poems from that collection - “Goggle Girl” and “Exposure” - at the 2021 “PAMLA Arts Matter: Among the Unrest” roundtable.

Dee Horne respectfully acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish, K’ómoks and Te’mexw Treaty Association where she lives and the traditional and unceded territory of the Lheidli T'enneh where she also works as a professor in the English Department at the University of Northern British Columbia. Dee has published academic books, chapters, articles and reviews. Her most recent scholarly book is Mary Oliver’s Grass Roots Poetry. As well, she has published fiction and poetry. This fall, she collaborated in an interdisciplinary project on the Salish Sea (“Endangered Relations”). She is currently working on revising a collection of poetry, and these poems are part of that collection.

Hannah Baker Saltmarsh is the author of the poetry collection, Hysterical Water (University of Georgia Press, 2021), an assistant professor of English at Mount Mercy University in Iowa, and a mother of three. She is currently working on a second book of poems about environmental disaster; and a critical book about the poetics of motherhood.

Tristan Acker is also known as Tanjint Wiggy and sings, raps and plays keys with his nerd-rap hip-hop group West Coast Avengers (westcoastavengers.com). Based in San Bernardino, he earned his MFA in poetry at Cal State University and organizes with his Union SEIU Local 1000 when not writing, performing and tutoring local youth.

Gerald Clarke’s family has lived in the Anza Valley for time immemorial. As an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, Gerald lives in the home his grandfather built (c.1940) on the Cahuilla Reservation and currently oversees the Clarke family cattle ranch. He is currently employed as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Riverside where he teaches classes in Native American Studies. Gerald is heavily involved in the reclamation and preservation of traditional Cahuilla culture. Check out Gerald’s work at www.geraldclarke.net.

Cindy Rinne creates fiber art and writes in San Bernardino, CA. Represented Poet by Lark Gallery, LA, CA. Pushcart nominee. Author of Words Become Ashes: An Offering (forthcoming Bamboo Dart Press), Today in the Forest (Moonrise Press), silence between drumbeats (Four Feathers Press), Knife Me Split Memories (Cholla Needles Press) and others. Her poetry appeared or is forthcoming in: Anti-Heroin Chic, Verse-Virtual, LitGleam, and anthologies. You can visit her work at www.fiberverse.com.

Craig Svonkin is the Executive Director of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) and Professor of English at MSU Denver. His essays include “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room” and “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering.” He is working on The Bloomsbury Handbook to Contemporary American Poetry, a number of children’s books, and the unlikely-to-be-published-anytime soon novel, The Book of Craig. You can visit his work here.