Dr. Bryan Ripley Crandall is Director of the Connecticut Writing Project and Professor of English Education at Fairfield University. With 30+ years of working with K-12 schools in multiple settings, he collaborates with 150 National Writing Project sites to promote best practices in literacy instruction. His community-engaged work has been honored with Divergent Awards from the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age, a Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Honor, the Rev. Jeffrey von Arc, SJ Award for Excellence in Community Engagement, an Elizabeth M. Prfiem Civic Leadership Award, a Martin Luther King, Jr. Vision Award, as well as several other recognitions. Crandall has published a 1,000+ youth through Young Adult Literacy Labs held each summer at Fairfield University, and hosted even more young people in collaboration with authors through several Writing Our Lives youth conferences. His academic writing focuses on activity genre theory, young adult literature, best practices in literacy instruction, and the importance of creating inclusive writing environments. Crandall is also co-host of The Write Time, the National Writing Project’s video podcast that brings authors of children and young adult literature into conversation with classroom teachers. He can be reached at: bcrandall@fairfield.edu.

Nikkya Hargrove is a graduate of Bard College and currently serves as a member of the school's Board of Governors and chair of the alumni/ae Diversity Committee. A LAMBDA Literary Nonfiction Fellow, she has written about adoption, marriage, motherhood, and the prison system for The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times,Scary Mommy, and Shondaland. She has worked for social impact nonprofits providing support to underserved communities throughout her professional career. She lives in Connecticut with her wife and three children. (more)

Karen Karbiener is an internationally recognized Walt Whitman scholar and a Distinguished Teaching Award-winning professor at New York University. She has published widely and curated several exhibitions on the poet; she is also president of the Walt Whitman Initiative, a non-profit organization serving as an organizing center for cultural activism and free poetry-related events. Karen is currently at work on American Kosmos: The Lives, Loves, and Worlds of Walt Whitman (HarperCollins, 2027). (more)

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. (more)

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. He is the author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees (Match Factory Editions, 2025) and the forthcoming collection Beginning to Sense (Match Factory Editions, 2026). He facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series, co-founded the Not at AWP (NAWP) reading series, and serves as a poetry editor for The Weight Journal. (more)

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. (more)

Amie Souza Reilly is a visual artist and multigenre writer from Connecticut. She is the author of Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025), which was named a Best Book of Nonfiction by Electric Literature and one of the Washington Independent Review of Books 51 Favorite Books of 2025, and is a finalist for the 2025 Big Other Book Award in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Wigleaf, HAD, The Chestnut Review, SmokeLong Quarterly 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. (more)