Sareya Taylor is a White Mountain Apache and Navajo poet and community worker. She earned a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Taylor served as the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Phoenix, Arizona and has earned fellowships with Planet Forward, In-Na-Po, Intertribal Agriculture Council and the United National Indian Tribal Youth organization. Sareya served as the 2023-2024 Ms.American Indian Higher Education Consortium, and was selected to be an Etherea Global Ambassador. Her poetry has been published in Thin Air Magazine, Tribal College Journal, Yellow Medicine Review and Another Chicago Magazine.

Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist living on unceded Cherokee land (Asheville, NC) and raised by the Tar and Hérault rivers. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. They are a student of belonging and embodied relationship to land who believes in slowness, reciprocal relationship with place and people, and queer, kincentric futures.

Inés Hernández-Ávila (Niimiipuu/Nez Perce and Tejana), is a poet, scholar-activist, visual artist, and Professor Emerita, Native American Studies, UC Davis. Her co-edited book Indigenous Poetics, with Molly McGlennen (Ojibwe), Michigan State University Press, was released in April 2025. She collaborates with the Library of Congress to increase the recordings of Indigenous writers of the Americas for the LOC Palabra Archive. She is a member of Luk’upsíimey/The North Star Collective, a Nez Perce group of creative writers and language workers. She has working relationships with Indigenous writers from Chiapas who create in Indigenous languages as a way to revitalize their original languages.

Aditi Bhattacharjee is an Indian writer and translator. Her work has appeared in Pinch Journal, Epiphany, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from The New School.

Danielle Shandiin Emerson is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). Her maternal grandfather is Ashííhí (Salt People Clan) and her paternal grandfather is Táchii’nii (Red Running into the Water People Clan). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He completed Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His interviews and book reviews are at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Pleiades Magazine, Full Stop, and the Los Angeles Review.

Taté Walker (they/them) is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller. They are the author of “Indigenous Voices: Inspiring & Empowering Quotes from Global Thought Leaders” (Wellfleet Press 2025) and “The Trickster Riots” (Abalone Mountain Press 2022), a full-length poetry book that was fully illustrated by their then 12-year-old child, Ohíya Walker. Learn more at jtatewalker.com.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, educator, and community artist who dreams and writes toward a borderless world with rematriated lands. What can language do for our resistance efforts? How can we use it to cultivate new worlds and weave our ancestors into the fabric of them? Ultimately, they believe in poetry as dutiful imagination and liberation practice. Their storytelling is rooted ancestrally in the lands of Puebla, México (Nahua) and the island of Kiskeya-Ayiti.

Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. Inaugural ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year, her work can be found in The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner and Poets.org among other publications. In 2024 Mayes was a Finalist for the Furious Flower Prize and the Adrienne Rich Award. Mayes has received scholarships and support from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Community of Writers, and Lighthouse Writers. She currently serves as the Executive Editor of Nashville Review.

RowieShondeen Shebala, Diné (Navajo Nation), brings poems to her audience from her experience growing up on the reservation and the teachings of her parents, grandparents, and community. She holds a B.S. in theater from NAU and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing - Poetry from IAIA. Spoken Word Poet who has been on four National Poetry Slam teams, a five-time representative for the WOWPS, and a two-time representative for the IWPS. Shebala’s work has been featured in The Rumpus Magazine, Button Poetry, Indian Country Today, Annick Press, Red Ink, the Smithsonian National Museum of American Indians, and the Poetry Foundation's Dine Poetics series. Shebala has performed her spoken word poetry nationally and at the Lincoln Center for the Out of Doors Project. She has taught at ASU Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and as a Master Artist teacher for the Identity Project. A Dine Artisans Authors Capacity Building Institute Fellow 2024

Ruoyang Zheng is an artist, activist, and aspiring lawyer. They currently work as Youth Engagement Program Manager at Here On Earth, an environmental arts nonprofit in NYC, while supporting revitalization efforts of Cook Islands Māori under linguists Ake Nicholas and Rolando Coto-Solano. They also serve as Web Coordinator on the Advisory Council of the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang).

As a 2024 Diverse Discourse Fellow at the New York Institute for Cognitive Science and the Humanities, they deeply believe in the power of interdisciplinary collaboration, and aim to bridge their climate and language activism through pursuing more-than-human rights law.

K’Ehleyr McNulty (they/them/elle) is a member of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation. They live and work in creative writing on the lands of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash Nations. They are honored to have their poem, “Unprecedented”, included in the Madrona Project, Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia, edited by Holly J Hughes, and, “Sacrifice”, included in I Sing the Salmon Home, edited by Rena Priest.

Tyler Mitchell is a Diné poet from Tsaile, Arizona, and currently writes out of Phoenix, Arizona where he also teaches.

Thomas Dayzie is a Diné-Jewish writer (tódíchʼíiʼnii bashishchiin, lók'aa' dine'é dashinalí) working on his first novel. He earned his undergraduate at Princeton University with a concentration in English and certificates in Creative Writing and Humanistic Studies. He is a first-year MFA student in Creative Writing at IAIA and an instructor in the undergraduate department. His interests include poetry, experimental fiction, and continental philosophy.

Sunni Parisien (Anishinaabe) is a poet and citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota. In 2024, Sunni was named an Indigenous Nations Poets fellow. Additionally, she served as the Project Assistant for In-Na-Po’s 2024 #LanguageBack workshop series, a project focused on exploring the role of Indigenous poetics in Indigenous language revitalization efforts. She is currently a senior at Yale University studying Ethnicity, Race, and Migration with a focus on Indigenous Studies.

Anne Heintz is a Phoenix-based writer and teacher. Her short fiction appeared in Four Chambers 04. She was a featured storyteller for Spillers, a performance art event showcasing Arizona writers. Along with collaborators Raúl Rivera Pun, Marissa Garcia, and Diego de la Espriella, she created Palo Verde, a new musical; the staged reading was produced by Collective Arts Productions in Norman, OK. Anne is an organizer and moderator for the Central Phoenix Writers Workshop. She teaches online for the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program at Michigan State University. She and her husband very much enjoy coaching their kids’ various sports teams.

Chanelle Lana Hoshnic, a contemporary artist from Arizona, is known for her abstract paintings that explores deep into human emotion and experiences. Born into a vibrant upbringing, her passion for color, form, and expression ignited her artistic journey. Drawing from fine arts, her work features bold, expressive styles with vivid hues and dynamic brushstrokes, which captive the viewer’s imagination.

An enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, Melanie splits her time between Colorado and Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest -- as a winner of the James Welch Prize -- as well as Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and New South, an anthology, Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (University of Alabama Press).

Melanie has worked as a screenwriter for the Chickasaw Nation, and has a few short films to her credit, including two produced and directed by her son for the 24 Hour Film Festival. She was an Indigenous Nations Poetry Fellow for 2023 and 2024, and is passionate about their Language Back initiative, striving to learn her own native tongue, Chickashanompa. Most recently, Melanie was awarded a fellowship with Storyknife, a women's writing retreat in Homer, Alaska.

Zêdan Xelef is a polylingual poet, translator, organizer, and archivist. They grew up in the Yazidi community of Shingal Mountains where they herded four goats with three other cousins. They are the co-creator of Tew Tew, an oral history and oral traditions archive with a mission to conserve the endangered Yazidi oral traditions in response to the Yazidi genocide. They’re the writer of A Barcode Scanner (Kashkul Books 2021/Gato Negro Ediciones 2022) and co-editor and co-translator of Something Missing from This World: Contemporary Yazidi Poetry (Deep Vellum, August 2024). 

Julian C. Ankney is Niimíipuu ‘Nez Perce’ from Idaho. Her scholarship includes creating a space for Indigenous language reclamation as resistance and her work has significance for social justice awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP), as her brother, Michael Murphy, went missing in 2018. Ankney is the director of Native American Programs, co-director of the Visiting Writers Series at Washington State University Vancouver. She teaches Native American literature that focuses on the importance of language revitalization, reclamation and resistance, the importance of Nez Perce language and culture through story and poetry. She was featured in the Hearst Museum’s online exhibit, Cloth that Stretches: Weaving Community Across Time and Space, exploring textiles as cultural sites of identity formation and cultural resilience (2020). Ankney was featured in Fishtrap’s 2022 program, Renewal: A conversation with luk’upsíimey/NorthStar Collective: núunim nimipuutímt, núunim wéetes/our language, our land, and was a 2023 Arts and Research Center, University of California Berkeley, Poetry & the Senses Fellow. Her work is published in Talking River, Yellow Medicine Review, and EcoArts on the Palouse. Lastly, Ankney is a member of luk’upsíimey, The North Star Collective, an Indigenous Plateau literary advocacy group. 

Denise Dominguez is a Mexican-American artist, printer, and mother from Yuma, Arizona. She loves working with different materials to explore memory, identity, and what it means to feel at home in the world.

Ayoneceli Rodriguez Segura is a mixed media artist. Born in Mexico City. At the age of six she migrated to the u.s. along her mother and sisters. She currently resides in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work focuses on identity, migration, and grief. She uses mixed media to create paintings, illustrations and books. Ayoneceli has shown work locally with the Black Girl Brown Girl collection, and most recently at The Falsstaff, and Astretix Gallery along Diana Calderon. Currently, Ayoneceli is focused helping her migrant and queer community with the help of Trans Queer Pueblo, where she helps the art and media team.

Amber McCrary is Diné poet and zinester. She is Red House Clan born for Mexican people. Originally from Shonto, Arizona and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. She earned her BA from Arizona State University in Political Science with a minor in American Indian Studies. She received her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry at Mills College. McCrary is also the owner and founder of Abalone Mountain Press, a press dedicated to publishing Indigenous voices.

She is a board member for the Northern Arizona Book Festival and Words of the People organizations. She is the Arizona Humanities 2022 Rising Star of the year and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation LIFT awardee.

Her debut poetry collection, Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert is out now from University of Arizona Press.  

You can find her poems, interviews and art at Yellow Medicine Review, POETRY Magazine, Room Magazine, Poets and Writers Magazine, The Navajo Times, Santa Fe Literary Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review.