queer intersections

M Shelly Conner (she/her)

M Shelly Conner, PhD is a writer, assistant professor of creative writing and Interim Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Central Arkansas. She is a multi-genre writer whose essays examine the intersections of race, gender, queer culture and sustainable living. Her comedy webisode Quare Life was an official selection at 2018 Outfest in Los Angeles and New Fest: NY's LGBTQ Film Fest. Her debut novel everyman is available from booksellers in hardcover, ebook and audiobook and has been featured in Ms. Magazine, Travel + Leisure, Parade, and Entertainment Weekly.

Wo Chan (they/them)

Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of TOGETHERNESS (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, and The Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts and elsewhere. Follow their work at @theillustriouspearl

Ruben Quesada (he/him)

Ruben Quesada, Ph.D. is editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, author of Revelations, Next Extinct Mammal, and translator of Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda. His writing appears in Harvard Review, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He has served as an editor and coordinator for The Rumpus, Kenyon Review. AGNI, Pleiades, Publishing Triangle Awards, and PEN America Literary Awards. He serves on the board of Foglifter Press and the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Chicago.

Xan Phillips (they/them)

Xan Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a Whiting Award, Lambda Literary Award, and The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xan is the author of HULL (Nightboat Books 2019) and Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. They have received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan’s poetry is featured in Berlin Quarterly Review, Bomb Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review.