Patricia Barnett resides in Southfield, MI with her family, Ryan, Keisha, and Justin. She is currently a Healthcare professional and holds an MBA. Patricia has been interested in historical and science fiction from childhood. Her lifelong dream has been to become an author of novels and screenplays and continues to write as a favorite pastime.
Reginald Dwayne Betts writes poems and runs a book club, YoungMenRead, for children in the DC Metro Area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Obsidian III, Poet Lore and Hanging Loose and he's currently at work on a memoir, "A Question of Freedom."
Tara Betts is the author of Arc and Hue. Tara appears in Callaloo, Obsidian III, Bum Rush the Page, Gathering Ground and both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies. She currently teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.
R.C. Brown received Honorable Mention in the PEN Prison Writing Contest for his poem "A Way of Saying." He reads poetry constantly. Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, and Amiri Baraka are among his favorites. Brown continues to write and attend poetry class every Tuesday under the esteemed tutelage of Cara Benson and The First Poets of Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility.
Seán M. "Casito" Dalpiaz's work has appeared in BoogCity (Issue 48), Quay, and The Acentos Review. Thanks to the un-poet NYSDOCS and all the poets (declared and undeclared) of his life,
Mitchell L. H. Douglas is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). His poetry appears in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, and the anthologies The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press), and Zoland Poetry Volume II (Zoland Books). A Cave Canem fellow and cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets, his debut collection, Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, is available from Red Hen Press.
Richard Hamilton lives in Alabama. A Cave Canem Fellow, his work has appeared in numerous print and online journals including "A" Magazine, MATTER Journal, Cross-Cultural Poetics, and The Drunken Boat (AZ). He teaches creative writing at Tuskegee University.
Melanie Henderson, fourth generation native of Washington, DC, is a graduate of Howard University and a MFA candidate at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. A visual and literary artist and an alum of Voices Summer Writing Workshops (VONA), her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as Black Arts Quarterly, Drumvoices Revue, Fingernails across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora, Jubilat, Tuesday; An Art Project, and Warpland Journal.
Angela Jackson is an award winning poet, playwright, and novelist. She is the recipient of the Shelly Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her collection Dark Legs and Silk Kisses was awarded the Chicago Sun Times/Friends of Literature Book of the Year Award and the Carl Sandburg Award. And All These Roads Be Luminous was nominated for the National Book Award. Her forthcoming novel Where I Must Go (Northwestern University Press) has been awarded an American Book Award. Jackson is at work on a collection of poems, An Island in Time.
Amanda Johnston, Cave Canem Fellow and Affrilachian Poet, has performed across the country for various causes and events. Honors include a 2003 and 2004 Artists Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the 2005 Austin International Poetry Festival's Christina Sergeyevna Award. She is an ensemble member of The Austin Project Performance Company (TAPPCo) and is the founding editor of TORCH: poetry, prose, and short stories by African American Women.
Cole Lavalais received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chicago State University. Her work has appeared in Warpland and the anthology Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also teaches creative writing and literature.
Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books). His second book, Mixology, was selected as a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and is forthcoming in May, 2009. “Roadwork at Seal Rock” is from his manuscript-in-progress, The Big Smoke: Jack Johnson Tells It. He teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
David Mills is a Cave Canem alum. He is published in Obsidian III, Rattapallax, Margie, Hanging Loose Press. He has won a PALF poetry award, the Hughes Diop award at Chicago State University and a Brio award.
John Murillo is a two time Larry Neal Writers' Award winner and teh 2008-2009 Elma P. Stuckey Visiting Emerging Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago. A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the New York Times. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Lumina, Columbia Poetry Review, and the anthology, DC Poets Against the War. In 2008, his work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Susan Nixon teaches Philanthropy, Public Policy and Community Change, and serves as co-director of the Case Studies in Philanthropy Project at Loyola University Chicago’s Philanthropy and Nonprofit Sector Program Ms. Motley holds a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from Roosevelt University (1969) and was named a Loeb Fellow ‘90’ at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. She attended the Voices of Our Nations writing conference in 2004 and was a resident artist at the Ragdale Foundation, fall 2005. Ms. Motley is a Graduate Student-At-Large, Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University.
Tacuma Roeback holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Chicago State University. Roeback is a critic for hip-hop website, okayplayer.com. His articles have appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Phoenix New Times and the Tennessean (Nashville, TN). His short fiction has appeared in Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas and Girl Speak. His essay entitled, “Masking,” will appear in SAGE publication’s Encyclopedia of Identity in 2010. He is an adjunct instructor in English at DePaul University.
Nicole Sealey is a writer, editor, and Cave Canem fellow. Her interviews with writers Nikki Giovanni and Sapphire can be found in Mosaic literary magazine and Artists and Influence: Volume XXV, respectively. She was recently selected to participate in the 13th annual Minority Writers Seminar in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the Readings/Workshops and Writers Exchange Program Coordinator at Poets & Writers, Inc. She lives in New York City.
L. Lamar Wilson, a Cave Canem fellow, MFA candidate at Virginia Tech and freelance journalist/editor, has work in Rattle, The Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications.
Gail Upchurch is a current Clark Fellow at the State University of New York at Binghamton where she's working on a doctoral degree in literature and creative writing/fiction and also completing a novel entitled
Six Months Come and Gone.
Demetrice Anntía Worley’s poetry appears in anthologies such as Women. Period. (Spinster Ink, 2008) and Courage, Risk, and Women (U of North Texas P, 2007) and has appeared in literary journals such as Permafrost, Clackamas, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She is a Cave Canem Fellow. Currently, she is an associate professor of English at Bradley University where teaches creative writing and African American literature. In her spare time, she visualizes world peace.
