About the Poets:

Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens born poet, her people hail from Trinidad & Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, their debut book of poems, is out now through YesYes Books. You can currently find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa.

Nadia Alexis is a poet, writer, and photographer born to Haitian immigrants in Harlem, NYC. She is the author of Beyond the Watershed (CavanKerry Press, 2025), a hybrid poetry and photography collection that was also a finalist for the Ghost Peach Press Prize. Her writing and photography have been published widely. She has received several honors, including a Literary Arts Fellowship and a Mini-Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a Poet of the Year Honoree of the Haitian Creatives Digital Awards, a semifinalist of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, an honorable mention poetry prize for the Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, and several Pushcart Prize nominations. A fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole, she holds an English – Creative Writing PhD and a Poetry MFA from the University of Mississippi. She now lives in Southwest Mississippi where she continues to teach and make art.

Oluwaseun Olayiwola ‘s poems have been published and anthologized in Oxford Poetry, TATE, bath magg, 14poems, Re:creation, Queerlings, and Granta with forthcoming publications in the Poetry Review and PN Review. Most recently, he was placed second in the Ledbury Poetry Competition. His criticism has been published in Telegraph, Magma, Poetry Birmingham, and the Poetry School. His choreographic work has been commissioned by Southwark Council and he is an associate artist at Swindon Dance. Oluwaseun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. He lives in London.

Terrance Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections: So to Speak; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. His most recent book, Watch Your Language, is a fascinating collection of graphic reviews, illustrated prose, and visualized poetics addressing the last century of American poetry. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University.