Moderator: Jessica E. Johnson (she/they) writes poetry and nonfiction. She is the author of Metabolics, a book-length poem, and In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, an Oregon Book Award finalist. They teach poetry, creative nonfiction, composition, and environmental literature at Portland Community College.

Janice Lobo Sapigao (she/her) is a poet from San José, CA. She is the author of two books of poetry, microchips for millions (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2016) and like a solid to a shadow (Nightboat Books, 2022). She was the 2020–21 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate.

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of Dream Country (Dutton, 2018), and See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), young adult novels that won the 2016 and 2019 Minnesota Book Awards in Young Peoples’ Literature, respectively. Gibney is faculty at Minneapolis College.

Tomas Moniz’s debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway, the LAMBDA, and the Foreward Indies Awards. He edited the popular Rad Dad zine for over a decade and the book Rad Families. He’s a 2020 Artist Affiliate for Headlands Center for Arts and 2022 UCross Resident.

Megan Savage is a widely published multi-genre writer and instructor at Portland Community College, where she teaches editing and publishing and cocoordinates the Carolyn Moore Writing Residency. She holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University where she was fiction editor of Indiana Review.