Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has become a touchstone for the identity-fluid internet age. Pathetic Literature, which they edited will be out in November. They live in New York and Marfa, TX. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994), Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include Evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 and in Spring 2023 a “Working Life” will be released upon the world. They take pictures which they’ve shown at Bridget Donahue & in Provincetown at Schoolhouse Gallery. Their super-8 road film “The Trip” is on YouTube. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.
Photo credit: Shae Detar
Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books including Red Juice: Poems 1998 - 2008 and the Griffin Prize nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her latest collection of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was a finalist for a 2021 National Book Award, the General Governor’s Literary Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A well-regarded and popular teacher of creative writing, Hoa lives in Toronto with her family where she serves as a Visiting Practitioner for the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University and a mentor for writers as part of the graduate programs at Guelph University and the University of Toronto. She is member of She Who Has No Masters, a Vietnamese and South East Asian diasporic transnational collective of cis, trans, and non-binary women/womyn, and founding mentor of the SWHNM mentorship. In 2019, her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature, a prestigious international literary award often compared with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Photo credit: Waylon Hart
Poet & scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we (forthcoming 2023), semiautomatic, and the new black. Her work has twice garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and appears internationally. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the Stephen Henderson Award, and her joys include participating in such communities as Cave Canem, Poets at the End of the World, & the Community of Writers. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Image credit: the author