Omaria Sanchez Pratt Omaria Pratt (they/them) is a Black trans writer from North Carolina. They hold an M.F.A. from the University of Kentucky where they were a recipient of the 2018 Nikky Finney Fellowship. They have received fellowships from Periplus Mentorship Collective, Kimbilio for Black Fiction, Lambda Literary,  Roots. Wounds. Words. and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Their work can be found in Taint Taint Taint Magazine, StoryMagazine issue 9, and the Anthology of Appalachian Writers–VolumeXII, where they were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Mary unearths characters’ footsteps and voices to bring collective fulfillment to as many ancestors and contemporaries as her daily 4 a.m. rising allows.

JM Holmes is a father of two, whose family was displaced by the Eaton Canyon Fire in LA. He used to write for TV but now organizes full time with the All African People’s Revolutionary Party and Black Men Build. He has an old collection of stories with Little, Brown and a forthcoming debut novel from Common Notions Press.

Jason Harris is a Baltimore based writer, futurist and educational technologist.

Leesa Fenderson is an IP attorney and has recently completed her Doctoral studies in USC’s Creative Writing and Literature program. She is polishing a collection of short stories. Her work appears in Joyland Magazine, Story Magazine, CRAFT, Callaloo Journal, and elsewhere. Leesa believes deeply that art and rest are modes of resistance.

Shinelle L. Espaillat is a writer whose work has appeared in midnight & indigo, Pleiades Magazine, Torch Literary Arts, Tahoma Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Minerva Rising, Ghost Parachute, among others, as well as in the collections Ghost Parachute: 105 Flash Fiction Stories, Shale: Extreme Fiction for Extreme Conditions, and How Higher Education Feels: Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching. Her stories have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. She holds an M.A. in English-Creative Writing from Temple University. She teaches at Westchester Community College in NY.

Jamiyla Chisholm is an author, journalist and educator. She is the author of the book The Community: A Memoir. Jamiyla has appeared in The New York Times, and her writing has been published by BET, Colorlines, Essence, TIME’S UP and other companies and publications. As a writer and editor, Jamiyla leads creative content and storytelling for New York City’s first women’s college and has created narratives that seek to empower people of color and the silenced. As an educator, Jamiyla teaches on the importance of storytelling to create positive narrative and social change. In 2024, she joined the Kimbilio team as a Fellow.

Elizabeth Bryant is a lifelong student of the Minnesota River Valley. Her writing explores black interiorities, especially in rural and small town environments in the midwest. She has studied history and black studies, and worked as a barista, literary nonprofit manager, nanny, publicist, events programmer, butcher, and farmer-trainee. Elizabeth is a founding member of the Minneapolis-based artist collective Burn Something, and a current MFA student in fiction at the University of Maryland.

Samuel Autman For the thirteen years Samuel Autman wrote for daily newspapers in Tulsa, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, and San Diego, he felt more was calling to him.  After penning a front-page story about Cupcake Brown’s remarkable journey from crack addict and street gang member to law school graduate, he found it. Since then his nonfiction has appeared in It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, The Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction, The Chalk Circle: Prizewinning Intercultural Essays, Ninth Letter, The Common Reader, Under the Gum Tree, The Little Patuxent Review, PANORAMA: The Journal of Travel, Place and Nature, Memoir Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, The St. Louis Anthology and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology From Middle America. He’s a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee in nonfiction. When a young director named Chinonye Chukwu converted his flash nonfiction into a short film called “A Long Walk,” he began experimenting with form. His last publication, “Friends on My Screens and In My Head,” blurs the lines between personal narrative and screenwriting, television, and film history. Now a writing professor at DePauw University, he’s pursuing short fiction and screenplays.