Sealey Challenge Bundle Curated by Claudia Cortese

Meghan Privitello is the author of A New Language for Falling Out of Love (YesYes Books, 2015). Poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, Boston Review, A Public Space, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2014 NJ State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her chapbook, Notes on the End of the World, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016.

Avery M. Guess (@averymguess) is a recipient of 2015 NEA Fellowship for Poetry, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and residencies from the Albee Foundation, New York Mills Arts Retreat, Ragdale Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts at Firefly Farms. She is a PhD student in creative writing, poetry, at University of South Dakota and assistant editor for poetry at South Dakota Review. Recent and forthcoming publications include poems in Crab Orchard Review, Moon City Review, Thrush, Rogue Agent, Tinderbox, Glass, Rust + Moth, and Deaf Poets Society and creative non-fiction in Entropy and The Manifest-Station. Her chapbook, The Patient Admits, is available from dancing girl press, and her first full-length collection of poetry will be published in April 2019 by Black Lawrence Press. Avery’s website is averymguess.com.

Bettina Judd was born in Baltimore and raised in Southern California. She teaches courses in Black women’s art, Black culture, and Black feminist thought. She has received fellowships from the Five Colleges, the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Maryland. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry by Mythium Literary Magazine. Her poems have appeared in Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. More about her can be found at www.bettinajudd.com and www.patientpoems.com.

Caleb Luna is an artist, public scholar and theorist of the body. They hold a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Publishing, performing and curating across genre and medium, Caleb's cultural work examines race, size, sexuality and disability in media and culture. Ultimately, they are interested in engaging embodied difference as a generative resource toward fatter understandings of collective freedom. You can follow Caleb on Instagram and Twitter at @dr_chairbreaker, or get in touch with them at caleb-luna.com

Kristin Chang’s work has been published in Teen Vogue, The Rumpus, The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop), the Shade Journal, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net, and she has been anthologized in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3 and Ink Knows No Borders (Seven Stories Press). She is a 2018 Gregory Djanikian Scholar (selected by The Adroit Journal), the recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and a Resist/Recycle/Regenerate fellow with the Wing On Wo Project in Manhattan Chinatown. Past Lives, Future Bodies is her first chapbook. Her debut novel, Bestiary, is forthcoming from PRH/One World.

Lisa Dordal holds a Master of Divinity and a Master of Fine Arts (in poetry), both from Vanderbilt University, and teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt. She is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, Water Lessons (April 2022), and Next Time You Come Home (forthcoming 2023), all from Black Lawrence Press. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, and the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Image, The New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Greensboro Review, RHINO, Ninth Letter, and CALYX. Her website is lisadordal.com.

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review. Her first full-length poetry collection, ATRIUM (Three Rooms Press), was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry. Her collection HIJRA was selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press. She resides in Manhattan.

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. She has two new books in 2017: a poetry collection, The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press) and a memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother's Suicide (Beacon Press). Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been widely published and have received numerous honors, including a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award and a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. She currently teaches at Sierra Nevada College and the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.

Erin Hoover is the author of Barnburner, selected by Kathryn Nuernberger for Elixir Press’s Antivenom Award and winner of a 2018 Florida Book Award. Publishers Weekly called Barnburner a “candid portrait of normalized cruelty” that was “likely to get readers to question their own malignant perceptions and passivity in the face of injustice.” Her second book, No Spare People, is forthcoming in October 2023. Hoover’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and Best New Poets, among other publications. Poems from No Spare People have been published (or will appear) in Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, Couplet, the Florida Review, On the Seawall, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and Split This Rock. Hoover is an assistant professor of English at Tennessee Tech.

Gaia Rajan is the author of the chapbooks Moth Funerals (Glass Poetry Press, 2020) and Killing It (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Their work is published or forthcoming in the 2022 Best of the Net anthology, The Kenyon Review, THRUSH, Split Lip Magazine, diode, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. Gaia is an intern at Poets House, journal editor for Half Mystic, and web manager for Honey Literary. You can find them online at gaiarajan.com and @gaiarajan on Twitter and Instagram.

H.R. Webster has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, 32Poems, Muzzle, and Ecotone. You can read more poems at hrwebster.com

Ananda Lima’s work has appeared or is upcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, The Common, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the 2018 Vella Chapbook Prize), Tropicália (Newfound, forthcoming, winner of the 2020 Newfound Prose Prize) and Amblyopia (forthcoming, Bull City Press - INCH micro-chapbook series). She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.

Ösel Jessica Plante’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Best New Poets 2017 & 2019, Best Small Fictions 2016, Narrative Magazine, and Passages North, among others. She is winner of the 2018 Meridian Editors Prize in poetry, Honorable Mention in the 2018 Gulf Coast Prize, and Finalist in the 2019 Nimrod International Literary Awards. She is a former fellow of the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MA in English from the University of North Texas, an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. She writes and works at University of Portland in Portland, Oregon.