Desireé Dallagiacomo (she/her) is a writer, educator, and space creator. She is Chahta and is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and she has ranked in the top 3 at every major poetry slam in the United States. In 2017 she coached the Baton Rouge youth poetry slam team to an international championship at the largest youth poetry slam festival in the world, Brave New Voices.

Previously the program and artistic director for the largest youth spoken word organization in Louisiana, she is now a freelance teaching artist and an adjunct creative writing teacher at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. In 2016, she founded The Heart of It, a writing retreat for working-class, entry-level writers in the high desert of New Mexico.

Currently, Des leads a weekly writing workshop, curates The Heart of It, teaches writing at Baton Rouge Magnet High School, and is writing a memoir. SINK is her first full-length poetry collection and it is available wherever books are sold. If you want to read her current work, subscribe to her substack.

Shane Hawley is a writer and performer from Saint Paul, Minnesota. A fixture in the spoken word poetry scene since 2001, and a 2010 National Poetry Slam Champion, he has spent the past decade focused mostly on humor writing and screaming jokes at people. He has performed all over the country and alongside many impressive artists, all of whom he met at summer camp and they’re from Canada, so you wouldn’t know them. He lives in the special corner of your heart that you reserve for extreme extroverts who are always trying a little too hard.