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D’Faye Anderson is writer, reader, educator, jazz enthusiast, composer, and theatre and film artist. She brings the magic of a diverse backgrounds, including a past life as a vaudevillian and blues shouter.

Hank Bjorklund is a former Princeton University and New York Jets football player who turned to writing poetry to cope with a chronic brain condition likely caused by 16 years of tackle football. He is a retired business lawyer and educator. His book Head Hits I Remember: My Brain, Dysautonomia and Football includes poems and essays to encourage others who may also be dealing with challenging conditions. 

Caridad De La Luz (she/her/hers) is a world renowned spoken word artist known as La Bruja. She became the Executive Director of theNuyorican Poets Cafe in Jan. 2022 after beginning her career there in 1996. She recently won an Emmy as Script Writer for the cultural short “Legacy of Puerto Rican Poetry” which aired on ABC during the National Puerto Rican Day Parade 2021.

Tino Garcia Gross grew up in Manhattan, where he attended the drama program at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing arts. Now a Writing for Screen and Television major at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Tino is in love with writing of all kinds – poetry, screenplays, and beyond!

Haydil Henriquez is an afro-Dominican arts program educator, cultural worker and Bronx-bred poet. She is the inaugural Bronx Poet Laureate (2021-2023), the NYC Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Manager, board president of the Literary Freedom Project and college and career pathways teaching artist at BAM. Her debut poetry collection received the Audre Lorde Dignidad Literaria Award by Get Fresh Books publishing and will be out spring of 2025.

Evelyn Kandel is a Marine Corps veteran. For many years after college she was an artist, then became an art teacher until she retired in 1999. Now she’s the author of six poetry books and teaches adult poetry classes privately. She was honored to be chosen Nassau County Poet Laureate 2019-2022.

Born Amir Elkhalifa in Washington D.C. to a Sudanese father and African American mother, and raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland, Oddisee bore witness to stark inequity early in life and became as political as the city he was raised in.

Elkhalifa tackles the human condition with unwavering conviction and candor, merging elements of jazz, funk, and go-go into his hip-hop rooted production. Instead of pursuing record deals and executives, Elkhalifa has taken the less-traveled path. Streamlining elements of the industry early on, from single-handedly recording, producing, and mixing his music to steering his marketing strategy and tour runs.

A string of contemporary releases—Rock Creek Park (2011), The Beauty in All (2013), The Good Fight (2015), Alwasta (2016), and The Iceberg (2017)—headlining performances and tours with his 5-piece band, Good Compny, and streams in the hundred-millions have propelled him to international recognition and acclaim.
Long celebrated as a deep-thinking emcee that delivers a masterclass in lyricism over his own production often influenced with the Go-Go music of his DMV roots, Oddisee explores human ambition, posing the question: “how far are you willing to go, and why?” on his 2023 full length return “To What End.”

Oddisee’s work has been celebrated by NPR, TIME Magazine, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Washington Post, Complex, Hypebeast, KCRW, and many, many more across the globe.

Pitchfork deemed 2017’s trenchant The Iceberg “a focused beam of live-band and hip-hop soul that rattles loudly in our present political moment,” while Stereogum described 2020’s Odd Cure as “gorgeous” and with NPR booking Oddisee for TWO Tiny Desk performances.

In the natural and tragic order of everyday events, Mark Schulte became an orphan on March 12, 2024. He is glad to have eulogized his parents and not the other way ’round. He’s been an actor, a carpenter, a teacher and a poet for six decades and counting. He rhymes sometimes as MC Sun (usually on the train or in the street). As an autistic person and a survivor of sexual abuse, he has a soft spot for underdogs and outcasts.