LAURA PEGRAM,
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Laura Pegram is a multidisciplinary artist who is influencing a new generation of aspiring writers. Author, educator, and a jazz vocalist whose cabaret performance teamed her with jazz pianist, Donald Smith, Ms. Pegram is also a painter. Her richly hued vibrant murals are part of several private collections. She has worked as a Development Associate at Scholastic Productions, Inc., as an Instructor at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center and as an Acting Director / Instructor at the John Oliver Killens Young Writers Program.
dina abdulhadi,
photo editor
Dina Abdulhadi is a photographer, writer, and ex-scientist born and raised in Georgia. She first became a scientist in her high school's darkroom, making images appear on blank paper with strange chemicals that dyed her fingers yellow and made her feel like a magician. After working in academic and government laboratories, she’s returned to using words and images as her main incantations. She currently lives in Brooklyn and works for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
graham akhurst,
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Graham Akhurst is an Aboriginal writer hailing from the Kokomini of Northern Queensland. He has been published widely in Australia and America for poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction. His debut novel Borderland will be released in 2022 with Hachette Australia. Graham is the recipient of the W.G. Walker Fulbright Scholar to complete an MFA in fiction at Hunter College, CUNY. He has an Honours degree in creative writing and an Mphil in creative writing from the University of Queensland where he was also an Associate Lecturer in Indigenous Studies. He currently lives and studies in New York.
naima coster,
senior fiction editor
Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street, a story of family, loss, and renewal, set in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn (January 2018, Little A). The recipient of numerous awards, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Arts & Letters, Kweli, The Rumpus, Aster(ix), A Practical Wedding, Catapult, and Guernica, among other places. Naima is a teacher of writing and has worked with students in a range of settings, including youth programs, prison, and universities. She tweets about literature, culture, and justice as @zafatista, and she writes the newsletter, Bloom How Must.
ANITA FELICELLI,
SENIOR FICTION EDITOR
Anita Felicelli was born in India and grew up in Northern California. She is a fiction writer, poet, and critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Anita is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation grant, the recipient of a 2015 Kweli scholarship, and an alumna of Voices of Our Nations (VONA). She is the author of a poetry collection "Letters to an Albatross" (Blaze Vox, 2010). Her short stories have twice been finalists for the Glimmer Train awards and her nonfiction has received two awards from The San Francisco Peninsula Press Club. Anita's work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Brain Child, India Currents, Blackbird, Juked, Strangelet Journal, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at the South Asian blog The Aerogram. Anita triple-majored at UC Berkeley, holds a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, and worked as a litigator for a decade.
ESTELLA GONZALEZ,
SENIOR FICTION EDITOR
Estella Gonzalez was born and raised in East Los Angeles, which inspires most of her writing. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Kweli, Aster(ix) and Huizache and has been anthologized in Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature and Kaleidescope: Martindale Literary Award Winners 1988-2006. She received a Pushcart Prize “Special Mention” and was selected a “Reading Notable” for The Best American Non-Required Reading.
phuong anh le,
contributing editor
Born and raised in Son tay, Vietnam, Phuong Anh Le was educated at Princeton and Columbia Universities. She has worked as a free-lance journalist and translator in Hanoi and as an international lawyer in New York. Speaking four languages and having lived on four continents, she is currently based in Abuja, Nigeria, where she’s working on her first novel and a collection of stories set in Vietnam. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Warren Wilson College.
tracey Lewis-Giggetts,
associate editor
Tracey Lewis-Giggetts is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Philadelphia and founding publisher of NewSeason Books and Media, an independent press and content creation company based out of the metro Philadelphia Area. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from the University of Kentucky, an M.B.A. in Marketing from Montclair State University; an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Fairleigh-Dickinson University.
bahar mirhosseini,
contributing editor
Bahar Mirhosseini has worked as a public defender in the U.S. and with public defenders overseas. She is a VONA alum and a recipient of Hedgebrook’s Women Authoring Change Fellowship, one made in honor of Libyan lawyer and activist Salwa Bugaighis. During law school, she received the Haywood Burns Fellowship in Civil and Human Rights from the City University of New York School of Law. Bahar was first introduced to Kweli Journal during a fifth anniversary reading series the journal hosted with Jennine Capó Crucet in East Harlem, New York. She is working on a collection of short stories and a memoir.
PRINCESS PERRY,
SENIOR FICTION EDITOR
Princess Perry was born in Newport News, Virginia. She is a past winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award and a Virginia Commission for the Arts grant. Her short stories have appeared in African- American Review and Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia. In September 2014, her story "A Penny, A Pound" was published in the anthology All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press). She is working on her debut novel.
NAMRATA PODDAR,
INTERVIEWS EDITOR
“Namrata Poddar writes fiction, nonfiction, and teaches transnational American literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work across genres explores the intersection of power, privilege and storytelling via race, class, gender, place or migration. As a scholar, her writing has focused on maritime sites (boats, ports, beaches) and stories of global travel, environmentalism and tourism in small islands. Her research has appeared in English and in French in different journals or special issues on the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean across the world. Her creative work has appeared in Transition, Literary Hub, The Margins, The Progressive, CounterPunch, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Necessary Fiction, Resilience, The Feminist Wire, The Caravan and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures and an MFA in fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars. More at www.namratapoddar.com.
ANNA QU,
NONFICTION EDITOR
Anna Qu was born in Wenzhou, China and grew up in New York. Her nonfiction has appeared in Kweli, The Threepenny Review, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Kartika Review, X0Jane.com, Jezebel.com, and Free Range Nonfiction. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College and spent two years working in publishing. Currently, she is working on a memoir and lives in Brooklyn.
JODI M. SAVAGE,
Contributing editor
Jodi M. Savage is an employment discrimination and disability rights attorney. Jodi writes about race, gender, feminism, faith, and Alzheimer’s disease. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Catapult, The Establishment, Kweli and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
Jodi graduated from Barnard College and Seton Hall University School of Law. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Jodi can be found online at www.jodimsavage.com and on Twitter (@macreflections
CYNTHIA DEWI OKA,
POETRY EDITOR
Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). Her work has appeared in ESPNW, Hyperallergic, Guernica, Poets.org, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a contributor to the anthologies Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (OR Books, 2018), Who Will Speak for America (Temple University Press, 2018), and What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, edited by Martín Espada. Her work has also been selected for the Best of Kweli: An Aster(ix) Anthology (Blue Sketch Press, 2017), edited by Angie Cruz and Laura Pegram.
As a 2017 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grantee, she partnered with Asian Arts Initiative to create Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets based in Philadelphia. A three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, she has received scholarships from VONA and the Vermont Studio Center, the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor's Prize in Poetry, and the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award. She is originally from Bali, Indonesia.
VINCENT TORO,
POETRY EDITOR
Vincent Toro has an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University. He is winner of the 2015 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and is recipient of both a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. His poems have been published in Kweli, The Buenos Aires Review, The Acentos Review, Codex, The Journal, Matter, The Ostrich Review, The Cortland Review, The Caribbean Writer, and in the anthologies CHORUS, and The Waiting Room Reader 2. His play “21” won the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award and was staged at the Spanish Repertory Theater. From 2006-2011, Vincent was Theater Arts Director at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. During his tenure there he won The San Antonio Theater Councils Golden Globe for Direction of a Drama. He is a member of the Macondo Writer’s Foundation and serves on the board of GlobalWrites, a non-profit dedicated to promoting literacy through integration of technology and performing arts in schools throughout the U.S. Vincent teaches at CUNY’s Bronx Community College and is a poet in the schools for the Dodge Poetry Foundation and the Dreamyard Project. His collection, “Stereo.Island.Mosaic.” was released in January 2016 from Ahsahta Press.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Contributing Editor
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria, and his work has appeared in Kweli, AGNI, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, The Evergreen Review, amongst other literary journals.
His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Centre, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University's Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Centre in the Redwoods California, and Island Institute.
Kọ́láwọlé studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. A graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, he returned to VCFA to join the Faculty of the low-residency MFA program. His novel is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins. Kọ́láwọlé teaches full-time at Pennsylvania State University, where he is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English.
