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.

Phil Kaye’s work has been featured in settings ranging from NPR to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has performed his work in eighteen counties, and was invited to open for His Holiness The Dalai Lama for the celebration of his 80th birthday.

Phil is the co-director of Project VOICE, an organization that partners with schools to bring poetry to the classroom. A former teacher of weekly poetry workshops in maximum security prisons, Phil was the head coordinator of Space in Prisons for the Arts and Creative Expression. Phil is from California and currently lives in New York City.

Claire Schwartz’s poetry has appeared in Apogee, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews in The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale.

Stevie Edwards holds a PhD in creative writing from University of North Texas and an MFA in poetry from Cornell University. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Clemson University and author of Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012).

Edwards is currently Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review and her third full-length collection of poetry, Quiet Armor, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press’s Curbstone imprint. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her husband and a small herd of rescue pitbulls (Daisy, Tinkerbell, and Peaches). Stevie uses she/they pronouns.

William Evans is a writer, instructor and performer from Columbus, OH. He founded the Writing Wrongs Poetry Slam in 2009 and appeared on seven National Slam teams from Columbus collectively. His work can be seen online in Radius Poetry, The Legendary, Joint Literary Magazine and other publications.

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a spoken word poet & educator living in Boston whose fierceness and charm have made her a poetry phenomenon, with her work appearing on Upworthy, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and countless other media outlets. Melissa’s ability to speak truth to power as an unapologetically feminist Latina comes as a breath of fresh air to people expecting the “same old poetry.” Blending power, warmth, and flat-out hilarity, Melissa leaves readers and audiences not only excited about changing the world, but excited about being a part of that change.

Interested in booking Melissa for a show? Click here.

Sabrina Benaim is a writer, performance & teaching artist, whose home base is Toronto. She was a member of the Canadian championship-winning 2014 Toronto Poetry Slam team, & in 2015, she represented Toronto at the Women Of The World Poetry Slam.

Sabrina has written poems for ESPNW, The Government of Canada, & most recently, made her Canadian television debut with Sport Chek, writing & voicing the third installment of their #WhatItTakes Olympic Manifesto video series. Sabrina enjoys breaking down stigma, women who help women, & the Toronto Blue Jays. She will accept any invitation to dance.