Bryan Ripley Crandall is the Director of the Connecticut Writing Project at FairfieldUniversity where he holds a dual position in the Graduate School of Education and Allied Professions (GSEAP) and English Department in the College of Arts and Sciences. Crandall has 15+ years of urban education experience and has promoted youth to publish, perform, and educate others through the power of oral and written communication. He was a high school English teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, where he became a consultant for the National Writing Project, served on the state’s Writing Advisory Council, and was trained to be a Critical Friends Coach through the National School Reform Faculty.

Nikkya is a mom, wife, author, and owner of Stratford’s only bookstore. She enjoys cooking dinner for her family, binge watching (any) television show with her wife, and spending time experiencing life with her family and dogs, Evelyn and Oliver.

Karen Karbiener is a writer, curator, cultural activist, and scholar of nineteenth-century American literature and culture, with a special focus on Walt Whitman. She is a clinical professor at New York University and both the president and a founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative. 

Jory Mickelson is an award-winning writer and educator living in Xwotʼqom / Whatcom / Bellingham on the homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. They are the author of three books of poetry: Picturing (2025, End of the Line Press), All This Divide (2024, Spuyten Duyvil Press), and Wilderness//Kingdom (2019, Floating Bridge Press) which won a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Their work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Court Green, DIAGRAM, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jubilat, Mid-American Review, and other journals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and have received fellowships from the Dear Butte, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. They were also a 2022 Jack Straw Writer for the Jack Straw Cultural Center’s in Seattle, Washington.

Mitchell Nobis is a writer, a teacher, a dad, an aging rec-league basketball player held together by duct tape & hope, a transplanted farmboy, a former drummer, and probably some other things. He lives in Metro Detroit with his wife and children and the family dog. His debut poetry collection, The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees, is now availablefrom Match Factory Editions. It was recently reviewed in Plume Poetry.

Oliver Radclyffe is the author of FRIGHTEN THE HORSES, published by Roxane Gay Books and winner of the Memoir Prize for Books, and ADULT HUMAN MALE, published by Unbound Edition Press and shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle Leslie Feinberg Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TheLos Angeles Times, The Guardian,Electric Literature, The Gay & Lesbian Review, LitHub, PRINT Magazine and Them. Born in the UK, he currently lives on the Connecticut coast.

Amie Souza Reilly is a visual artist and multigenre writer from Connecticut. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Wigleaf, HAD, The Chestnut Review, The Atticus Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Barren, Pidgeonholes and elsewhere. She holds an MA in English Literature from Fordham University and an MFA from Fairfield University, and is the Writer-in-Residence and Director of Writing Studies at Sacred Heart University.