Nadia Q. Ahmad is a poet and writer based in her hometown of Queens, NY. Her work has been published in Poets & Writers Magazine, Newtown Literary, SpliceLit, AAWW Open City, and The Margins. She is a VONA/Voices and Kweli Journal workshop alum. Having been involved in various community initiatives in arts & culture in New York City, Nadia most recently worked as Program Associate at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is currently a board member of the Bangladesh Institute of Performing Arts (BIPA).

Asad Alvi is a translator and a poet. His work has appeared in The International Gallerie, Dawn, The Hindu, and Scroll, as well as We Will Be Shelter: An Anthology of Contemporary Feminist Poetry (ed. by Andrea Gibson), and the Columbia University’s Journal of Art & Literature, amidst others. In 2016, he became the youngest recipient of the Nasreen Anjum Bhatti Poetry Prize. Alvi’s debut book, The Tale of Sughandi: The Life and Works of Sara Shagufta, is forthcoming in 2018 by Speaking Tiger, India.

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, educator, and writer. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine,  BuzzFeed Reader, Academy of American Poets and many others. Her work has been featured on news outlets like PBS, NBC, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011, she created Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first Spoken Word Poetry group, REFLEKS, while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After was released on Yes Yes Books fall 2015. She is the writer of Brown Girls, an Emmy nominated web series that highlights a friendship between women of color. In 2017 she was the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her debut collection of poems If They Come For Us is forthcoming on One World/ Random House Summer 2018.

 Maaz Bin Bilal is Assistant Professor in literary studies at Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities at O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. He earned his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, UK, for his dissertation on the politics of friendship in E. M. Forster’s work. Maaz is interested in South-Asian Muslim identity and history, multiculturalism and secularism, Urdu literature with a focus on poetry, translation in practice with a focus on Urdu-Hindi-English, and creative writing. His first collection of poetry, Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu is forthcoming from Red River, New Delhi in 2018.

Sumita Chakraborty is poetry editor of AGNI, art editor of At Length, and a doctoral candidate in English at Emory University, where she is currently a fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Critique, and elsewhere. In 2017, she was a recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Sumayya Firdous identifies as an abeyant sociologist with unfinished credentials. For now she subsists on Urdu ghazal, cute shoes, and generalized misandry. Her livelihood is clerical. She lives in Kashmir.

Priyadarshini Gogoi is an aspiring poet and writer, and presently an editor of children’s books. When not writing, she is thinking about writing, and when not thinking of writing, she is bogged down by the ruinous angst of her quarter-life crisis.

Tara Jayakar is the Founding Editor/Bookmaker at Raptor Editing, and is earning her MFA from Sarah lawrence College. Mostly she’s a poet, loves breakfast and her friends.

Inam Kang is a Pakistani-born Muslim poet, student, curator and researcher currently living in Cleveland, OH as an MS candidate in Medical Physiology at Case Western Reserve University. He is also a former Ann Arbor Poetry & Slam finalist. Currently, he is a co-curator for the POC-centered reading and dialogue series FRUIT in Ann Arbor, MI. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Freezeray Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others.

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the FourWay Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017). In 2015 he was a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry at Auburn University. Read more about him at www.rajivmohabir.com

Vqueeram Aditya Sahai

Ather Zia is a poet and a political anthropologist who teaches Anthropology and Gender Studies at University of Northern Colorado Greeley. She is the founder editor of Kashmir Lit.