Jessica Kinnison directs the New Orleans Writers Workshop and regularly teaches classes centered in maintaining a writing practice and generating new work. Her work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Phoebe, Entropy, Juked, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her play Baby won the 2009 Southwest Theatre and Film Associations’ Short Play Contest. In April 2020, she was listed in among “Eight New Orleans Poets to Watch” in POETS & WRITERS. She holds an MFA from Chatham University in Pittsburgh where she taught creative writing in the Allegheny County Jail, as part of the Words Without Walls Program. A Mississippi native, she has taught writing at Tulane University, the Loyola Writing Institute, NOCCA, the Tennessee Williams Festival, 826! New Orleans, Orleans Parish Prison and Project Lazarus. She hosted Dogfish Reading Series in her home from 2015 to 2020 and serves on the Board of Directors for Antenna, a multidisciplinary arts organization and collective, and the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

Chioma Urama is a storyteller and visual artist of Igbo and African American heritage living in the Global South. Her written work is a deeply meditative process, connecting people, patterns, and ideas in efforts to heal herself and the collective. Her writing has been described as intuitive, intentional, and heart connected. Urama is a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship alumna and a graduate of the University of Miami MFA program, where she was a Michener Fellow. She taught creative writing and English composition at the University of New Orleans.