Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and performer. While teaching in Chicago Public Schools for five years, she competed on numerous national poetry teams and individual competitions. She is the 2017 NUPIC Champion and a 2017 Pink Door fellow.

Rachel recently voiced ‘DJ Raych’ in the game Mad Verse City. In October 2018 her latest play, Emotions and Bots, premiered at the Woerdz Festival in Lucerne Switzerland. She co-created the monthly poetry show Big Kid Slam. Rachel’s work has been published by many—including Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, and 29Rooms through Refinery29. She is working on her first collection of poems in Chicago and proudly loves every episode of Bob’s Burgers.

Michael Lee Vikre is a Norwegian-American writer, educator, abolitionist and anarchist. Author of The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry, 2019), he has received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Winner of the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry from the Key West Literary Seminar and the Arthur Lynn Andrews Award for Fiction from Cornell University, Michael’s writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets among others. He holds an Ed.M in Arts Education from Harvard University and an MFA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Cornell University. Currently, he coordinates a BA program, in which he also teaches, in Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies for incarcerated students in Minnesota. He lives in North Minneapolis.