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Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others.

Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award; Girls That Never Die (One World, 2022), featured on the Indie Bestseller list the week of September 7, 2022; and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country (Make Me a World, 2021), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of a California Book Award and an Author Honor from the Coretta Scott King Book Awards. With Fatimah Asghar, she is coeditor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).

She has received support as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and a Cave Canem Fellow. She won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 30 Under 30. Her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by Under Armour, Ilia, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. She lives in Los Angeles.

Chrysanthemum is a poet, performance artist, and public historian. She serves as Co-Director of the Providence Poetry Slam, one of the oldest slam venues in the US. She is the recipient of a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Kundiman Fellow, and a Lambda Literary 2023 Justin Chin Memorial Scholarship Fellow. In 2024, she was named the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for LGBTQ Writers in Schools’ first-ever LGBTQ+ Youth Poet Laureate Residency.

She broke ground as a finalist in the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam, and her teams were champions of the Rustbelt Poetry Slam and the first FEM Slam. With Justice Ameer, she served as Artist-in-Residence at Williams College and staged the interdisciplinary show ANTHEM at the American Repertory Theater’s OBERON. Through the support of a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation, Chrysanthemum organized the Vanishing Point Writing Retreat to connect diasporic Asian poets through collaborative, peer-led instruction, modeled after Rachel McKibbens’ Pink Door Writing Retreat.
Now calling Providence home, she was born to Vietnamese parents in Oklahoma City, where she came of age around the NW 39th Street gayborhood and Asian American enclave. Chrysanthemum is developing her debut collection of poems. Her writing appears in The Nation, Them, The Offing, The Rumpus, Button Poetry, among others.

By day, she inspires Boston’s youth as a theater teacher; by night, she channels those skills into her explosive alter ego, Cakeswagg. Hailing from Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, Cakeswagg’s performance at the 2024 Boston Calling Music Festival was praised by The Boston Globe as “highly dynamic and loads of fun,” noting her “massive personality and infectious energy.” Not only does Cakeswagg deliver powerhouse performances at major festivals, but she is also deeply embedded within Boston’s local music community, winning the crowd-voted “Master of the Chamber” battle-rap event and delivering the closing performance at the 2024 Boston Music Awards, where she also won “Video of the Year.”

As a theater teacher, Cakeswagg is shaping Boston’s next generation of artists. In association with Boch Center, Cakeswagg teaches theater to students across Boston Public Schools from elementary to high school. With the Huntington Theatre Company, Cakeswagg teaches August Wilson monologues, introducing students to the rich cultural narratives inherent in Wilson’s acclaimed works.

Cakeswagg’s latest album, Michelin Star, named after the prestigious culinary rating, reflects her artistic growth since her 2018 debut. Stepping beyond the lyrical rap she’s known for, the album explores influences from rock to R&B and features her singing for the first time, showcasing her versatility and offering something fresh for fans, both old and new.

Tim Hall is an award winning Educator, Artist, and Entrepreneur, from Detroit, MI, who now resides in Boston, MA. He began playing alto saxophone at the age of 10. In college, Hall found poetry and used this form of creative expression to share his thoughts on paper. Tim Hall draws inspiration from his lived experiences – charting the nuances of blackness, masculinity, and the beauties of life. As a musician, Hall has shared stages with world-renowned recording artists such as The Nappy Roots, Carolyn Malachi, Bilal, Chris Turner, and Aloe Blacc. His poetry has been heard at Boston’s Hub Week, The Museum of Fine Arts, Berklee College of Music, Outside the Box Festival, Bridgin’ Gaps Festival, and many other venues and poetry slam communities around the Boston/Greater Boston area.

Boston native Cliff Notez is an award-winning, multi–digital media artist, musician, entrepreneur, and filmmaker. His art is a continuous exploration of the black mind.

He graduated from Wheaton College with a dual degree in music (voice concentration) and psychology in 2013. He then graduated from Northeastern University in 2016 with a master’s degree in digital media. While attending graduate school in 2015, he simultaneously took a position at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston as the teen new media programs associate. As an educator and administrator for digital media programs and events, he began his own digital media company, HipStory.

Rooted in hip-hop, his art tackles the political and the personal, exploring the intimate consequences of a society where black bodies are easily ignored, forgotten, or disregarded. His second full-length album, Why the Wild Things Are, was released September 11, 2019. His films have been official selections for 20+ film festivals globally, winning five of them. In 2017, he was the grand prize winner of the March on Washington Festival and honored alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates. In 2018, he took home the Best New Artist award at the Boston Music Awards, while racking up over 11 nominations between 2019 and 2020, including Artist of the Year and Live Artist of the Year. In 2019, he became the first musician to be named Musician of the Year for Boston Magazine’s Best of Boston.