Subcommittees

Travis Kurowski is the editor of Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine (Atticus Books, 2013), an Independent Publisher Book Award winner, and coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He has served on the mastheads of numerous magazines, including Story, winning a CLMP Firecracker Award. His writing has appeared in Ninth Letter, Creative Nonfiction, and TriQuarterly, and he was a columnist for Poets & Writers. He is an associate professor at York College of Pennsylvania, where he directs the writing program. He received his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi.

January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012 to 2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a cowinner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She was one of five judges for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry. O’Neil earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA from New York University.

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003 and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by Book Riot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.

Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections, including Made to Explode, as well as the disability memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. Honors include an NEA fellowship; six DCCAH fellowships; visiting professorships at Davidson College, University College Cork, American University, Hood College; and others. She teaches with the University of Nebraska Omaha low-residency MFA program and institutions such as the Writer’s Center and Politics & Prose. Beasley serves as poetry editor for Blair and the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Gravy. She lives in Washington, DC.

DeMisty D. Bellinger’s books include the poetry collection Peculiar Heritage, the novel New to Liberty, and the short story collection All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere. Her work can also be found in various journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Mass Cultural Council. Bellinger has written about pedagogy for numerous journals and anthologies. At Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts, she teaches creative writing; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; and African American studies, positioning her as a strong advocate for issues of diversity and inclusion. She serves as the coordinator of the Center for Faculty Scholarship at Fitchburg State. Finally, Dr. Bellinger is a violist who plays in a community orchestra and a board member of the Worcester Children’s Chorus, representing the arts through a multitude of channels.

Carla Du Pree is a fiction writer, state/national arts advocate, and executive director of Baltimore’s literary nonprofit CityLit Project, known for its CityLit Festival. She cofounded Scribente Maternum and the Write Like a Mother Retreat and created Gladiators, a professional mentorship program. She’s received fellowships from the Peter Bullough Foundation, Hedgebrook, Baldwin for the Arts, Rhode Island Writers Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (twice). She’s been awarded a Rubys, a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, the 2025 Cultural Innovator Award (Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance), and the 2020 National Assembly of State Arts Agencies’ inaugural Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award.

Photo credit: Jeffrey Wright

Brandel France de Bravo’s third collection of poems, Locomotive Cathedral, was selected in a contest from the Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press (March 2025). She is the author of two previous poetry books: Provenance and the chapbook Mother, Loose. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, The Cincinnati Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She has received five artist fellowship grants from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, which also honored her with the Larry Neal Writers’ Award in poetry.

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (cowinner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize), thirteen other books, and four chapbooks. She is lead editor, with coeditors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, 2023). She is the Louis I. Jaffe and University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Igloria is the twentieth poet laureate of Virginia (2020–2022), emerita. During her term, the Academy of American Poets awarded her a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellowship. Learn more at LuisaIgloria.com.

Justina Ireland is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, including Dread Nation, Deathless Divide, Rust in the Root, and Ophie’s Ghosts. She has written comics for BOOM!, IDW, Dark Horse, and Marvel. Ireland is also the author of a number of Star Wars books and one of the story architects of Star Wars: The High Republic. In her spare time, she writes for television. A United States Army veteran, she holds a BA in history and an MFA in creative writing. You can find her work wherever great books are sold. Visit her website at JustinaIreland.com.

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of The Understudy’s Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, was published by Blair in spring 2025. Leyva holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor.

Photo credit: Nicole Munchel

Thania Muñoz D. is an immigrant educator, translator, poet, and scholar. Her writing and translations have appeared in Copihue, The Acentos Review, Circumference, Fence, Firmament, La Bloga, Catedral Tomada, MARLAS, Latin American Literary Review, and others. In 1998, she immigrated to Southern California from Jalisco, México, and since 2015 has lived in Maryland. She is an associate professor of Latinx and Latin American literature, director of the M.A. Program in Intercultural Communication at UMBC, and the managing editor and founder of Latin@ Literatures.

Richard Jeffrey Newman has published three books of poetry—T’shuvah (Fernwood Press, 2023), Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions, 2017), and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006)—as well as three books of translation from classical Persian poetry: Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications, 2004, 2006), and The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Junction Press, 2011). He curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, New York. His website is RichardJNewman.com.

Photo credit: Brian Silak Photography

Clarence Harlan Orsi’s essays and fiction have appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, n+1, and others. He is a graduate of the PhD program in writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a former Bread Loaf tuition scholar. He is a professor of English at Cecil College in northern Maryland and a bookseller in Baltimore, where he lives. 

Zach Powers is the author of the forthcoming novel The Migraine Diaries (JackLeg Press, 2026), the novel First Cosmic Velocity (Putnam, 2019), and the story collection Gravity Changes (BOA Editions, 2017). His writing has been featured by American Short Fiction, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. He serves as executive and artistic director for the Writer’s Center and Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry magazine. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, he now lives in Arlington, Virginia. Get to know him at ZachPowers.com.

Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, The Sun, and Poetry Northwest. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature, and she serves on the advisory boards of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Sevick is the 2017 Press 53 Award for Poetry winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers, and she is the author of The Bamboo Wife, published by Trio House Press in 2024.

Photo credit: Adrienne Mathiowetz

Michael Tager is a writer, editor, and publisher who is currently on a vague hiatus from the literary “thing” because in order to do it right, parenting young kids takes a lot of effort and mental energy. He is the author of Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection (Akinoga Press, 2024). He is the former managing editor of Mason Jar Press and currently serves as the secretary of the board. His favorite movie is Clueless. He thinks you’re swell.

Laura Tohe is the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. She is an award-winning poet, and her books include No Parole Today, Making Friends with Water, Sister Nations, Tséyi, Deep in the Rock, and Code Talker Stories, which have appeared in the US, Canada, and Europe with French, Dutch, and Italian translations. Her commissioned librettos are Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio on the Naxos Classical Music label and Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World, with performances in France in 2019 and 2021. Among her awards are the 2019–2020 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers Award, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Award, and the Dan Schilling Public Scholar Award; she was twice nominated for the Pushcart Award. She is Professor Emerita with Distinction from Arizona State University.

Issam Zineh is a poet, editor, and public health worker. He is author of The Moment of Greatest Alienation (Ethel, 2021) and Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022), a Trio House Press Editors’ Selection and finalist for the Housatonic Book Award and Balcones Prize for Poetry. His writing appears in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, Prairie Schooner, Split This Rock, and elsewhere. He lives on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Piscataway and Susquehannock people.