Ronaldo V. Wilson is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, academic, and the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. He is the editor of three special issues of hybrid and experimental work in Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics; and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He has shown work and performed most recently at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, where he directs the Creative Writing Program, and serves on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).

Jennifer González writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation, digital and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender. González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Archives of American Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Open Space and Art Journal. Her second book, Pepon Osorio, received an International Latino Book Award. She served as chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology which was listed among the best art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020. González also writes numerous exhibition catalog essays, most recently for the exhibitions Diego Rivera’s America (2022), Amalia Mesa Bains: Archeology of Memory (2023), and Isaac Julien: I Dream a World (2025). She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally and teaches regularly at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, director, and scholar who creates performance writing invested in experimental process, collaboration, and collective live experience. His practice engages poets theater and street theater, soap opera and myth, performance art and communal improvisation, exploring counternarrative, the transmission of cultural memory, and the possibilities and limits of camp in plays about queer and trans life. His performance novel about AIDS archives and intergenerational memory, The Nancy Reagan Collection (Futurepoem, 2020), was recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020 and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His books theorize the performance novel as a score/site that blurs boundaries between page and stage, agitating conventional form and affect to activate poetry as an embodied, everyday practice. Crandall has received fellowships and grants from MacDowell, Yaddo, The Poetry Project, Onassis USA, and Headlands Center for the Arts. He is a poetry editor at FENCE and the Executive Director of Small Press Traffic, a Bay Area seedbed for poets who push boundaries in the arts.

Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her articles and essays on comparative and world literature, postcolonial studies, memory studies, affect theory, and genre theory have appeared in symploke, Gramma: A Journal of Theory, Comparative Literature Studies, Public Culture, PMLA, Concentric, Qui Parle, and Critical Times, as well as in the edited volumes Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, The MLA Guide to Teaching World Literature, the Routledge Companion to World Literature, Approaches to Teaching World Literature, The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, The Handbook of Anglophone World Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford UP, 2009) and, with Alex Brostoff and Lauren Fournier, is editing Autotheories: Transdisciplinary Experiments in Self-Theorizing.

Frances Richard is the author of Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics (University of California Press, 2019), and co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005); she is the editor of I Stand in My Place With My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Art at The New School (The New School/Duke University Press, 2019), and Joan Jonas is on our mind, a volume of essays on the artist (Wattis Institute, 2017). Her books of poems include Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003). She has been a member of the editorial teams at Fence and Cabinet, and is senior editor at Places journal. She lives in Oakland.