Presenting:

• Melissa Sipin – Nicknamed “small but terrible” by her lola, Melissa R. Sipin was born and raised in Carson, CA. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things (Carayan Press 2014) and is Editor-in-Chief of TAYO Literary Magazine. Her work is in Guernica Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her fiction has won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, as well as scholarships/fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Poets & Writers Inc., Kundiman, VONA/Voices Writers’ Workshop, Squaw Valley’s Community of Writers, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
• Avy Jetter – Avy is the artist and creator behind the comic book Nuthin Good Ever Happens at 4 a.m. A huge horror, gore and monster movie fan, she decided to tell a zombie apocalypse story based in Oakland which would center around characters who are people of color—both the zombies and protagonists alike.
• Vernon Keeve III – Keeve received the Zora Neale Hurston Award from Naropa University and is a contributing writer to Black Girl Dangerous. He earned his MFA from the California College of the Arts and a MA in teaching from Bard College.
• Aja Duncan – Aja Couchois Duncan is a Bay Area educator, writer and coach of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. Her writing has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press,) Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and Love Shook My Heart 2 (Alyson Press). Her debut collection, Restless Continent (Litmus Press) was selected by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and won the California Book Award in 2017.