Usman Hameedi is a Pakistani-American scientist, poet, educator. He also serves on Mass Poetry’s Board of Directors. Since 2008, he has competed in and coached for collegiate, national, and international level poetry slams. Usman has been featured on The Huffington Post, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and The Story Collider: Storytelling for Scientists podcast. His first full-length collection, Staying Right Here, is forthcoming by Button Poetry (2023). Usman was a Mass Poetry Artist in Residence and worked with students in Hyde Park and Salem. He has also worked with other educators on how they can incorporate poetry into their classroom communities. Usman is shaping his career around his missions and ideals. His proudest moments are helping others see the genius within themselves!

Junious “Jay” Ward is a poet living in Charlotte, NC, and the author of Sing Me a Lesser Wound (Bull City Press). Jay is a National Poetry Slam champion, an Individual World Poetry Slam champion, and Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate. He has attended and/or received support from Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Frost Place, Tin House Winter Workshop, and The Watering Hole, and currently serves as a Program Director for BreatheInk and Vice-Chair for The Watering Hole. His poems can be found in Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Columbia Journal, The Amistad, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.

Robert Wood Lynn is the author of How to Maintain Eye Contact (Button Poetry 2023), runner-up in the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, and Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press 2022), selected by Rae Armantrout as the winner of the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His poems have recently appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Narrative Magazine, Shenandoah, The Southern Review and other journals. He splits his time between Brooklyn, New York and Rockbridge County, Virginia.

Accolades:
2023 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow

Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland Ohio, where she is the current Lake Erie Siren & a teaching artist for Center For Arts Inspired Learning and The Sisterhood Project in conjunction with the Anisfieldwolf Foundation. She is a 2021 Premier Playwright fellow recipient with Cleveland Public Theater. She is a 2020 WateringHole Manuscript fellow, a 2018 winter tangerine chapbook fellow and a 2018 Poetry Foundation incubator fellow. Her work appears in, The Offing, BOAAT, Tinderbox, Josephine Quarterly and elsewhere. She has toured both nationally and internationally. She is the co-founder of Outsiders Queer Midwest Writers Retreat. Chances are she’s by a lake, thinking about Toni Morrison and talking to ghosts. In her spare time she is growing her afro so tall God can use it for a microphone and speak through her.

At only 25 years old, Blythe Baird is already one of the most recognizable and acclaimed names in spoken word poetry.

Originally from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, the viral writer has garnered international recognition for her stunning performance pieces that speak urgently and honestly about sexual assault, mental illness, eating disorder recovery, sexuality, and healing from trauma.

Her work has been featured by Glamour, ELLE, TEDxMinneapolis, The National Eating Disorder Association, Mic, The Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, Medium, The Mighty, The Body Is Not an Apology, Write Bloody, Button Poetry, A-Plus, and many more.

Baird graduated from Hamline University in 2018 with a dual degree in creative writing and women’s studies. In 2020, she became the recipient of the prestigious McKnight Artist Fellowship for Spoken Word administered by The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota.