A$iahMae, stylized A$iahMae, (they/she) is a Black, non-binary Southern poet, humorist and cultural worker with roots in Georgia, South and North Carolina. A multi-hyphenated artist, their background spans across film, curation, production, performance and language arts. A$iahMae is a Watering Hole Fellow and their work has been featured in The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston Food & Wine Festival, The Post and Courier, and more. They are the co-creator of the writing platform For The Scribes and co-host of its podcast FTS Presents: Penpals, along with fellow poet Willie Kinard III. They are currently serving as the Second Poet Laureate of Charleston, SC.

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Darrell Bourque
Darrell Bourque was born in southwest Louisiana in 1942. He started publishing poems when he worked on his Ph. D. at Florida State in the mid-70s and is the author of six books of poems: Plainsongs (issue # 1 in the Cajun writers series of Cross Cultural Communications, Merrick, NY,1994), The Doors Between Us (the inaugural issue of the Louisiana Writers Chapbook Series of Louisiana Literature Press,1997), Burnt Water Suite (Wings Press, San Antonio,1999), The Blue Boat (the inaugural issue of University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press's Louisiana Writers Series, 2004), and Call and Response: Conversations in Verse (with Jack B. Bedell- Texas Review Press, 2009), and In Ordinary Light, New and Selected Poems (University of Louisiana Press, 2010). He was named the Artist of the Year by the Acadiana Arts Council in 2001 and he served as both President of the National Association of Humanities Education and Editor in Chief of its journal Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is professor emeritus in English at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and he was named poet laureate of Louisiana by Governor Kathleen Blanco in 2007. He served in that capacity in 2007 and 2008 and was reappointed to the position in 2009 by Governor Bobby Jindal. Bourque lives with his wife Karen, a glass artist, in rural southwest Louisiana

Tyler Robert Sheldon is an American poet, writer, educator, editor, and critic. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections When to Ask for Rain (Spartan, 2021), and Driving Together (Meadowlark Books, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Consolation Prize (Finishing Line, 2018), Traumas (Yellow Flag Press, 2017), and First Breaths of Arrival (Oil Hill Press, 2016). With James Benger he coauthored Against the Dark: road poems (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), a composite travel narrative. Sheldon is the Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review, and is also a book reviewer for various print and online publications. His poetry, fiction, artwork, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, The Tulane Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Pleiades, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Coal City Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, Entropy Magazine, Thorny Locust, The Big Nasty Press, and other places. His latest chapbook, "Everything is Ghosts" is forthcoming this fall from Finishing Line Press.