Melissa Fite Johnson
Bishop Seabury Academy
Lawrence, Kansas, USA
melissafitejohnson@gmail.com

Author Bio

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal by and for teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS, where she co-hosts the Volta reading series at the Replay Lounge.

Kevin Rabas
Emporia State University
Emporia, Kansas, USA
krabas@emporia.edu

Author Bio

Past Poet Laureate of Kansas (2017-2019) Kevin Rabas teaches at Emporia State University. He is a seventh generation Kansan. His several books include Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner. He is the recipient of the Emporia State President’s and Liberal Arts & Sciences Awards for Research and Creativity, and he is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award for Poetry. His plays and films have shown across the Midwest and on both coasts.

Janan Chan
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
janan.chan@mail.mcgill.ca

Author Bio

Janan Chan is a PhD student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University, Montréal, Canada. His research project engages multilingual language learners in writing translingual poetry for aesthetic and expressive purposes. Completing his MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University, he moved to Shanghai, China, where he taught EFL from 2021 to 2024. His poems, appearing in Warm Milk, The Mitre, Fauxmoir and Soliloquies Anthology, explore themes such as identity, belonging and nostalgia. Through his regular blog posts for BILD (Belonging, Identity, Language, Diversity), a blog and journal based out of McGill university, he has reflected upon and documented his teaching practices, the subversive uses of internet culture in China and neighbourly trust during China’s pandemic lockdown. He was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Toronto, Ontario and a small town in Québec. He now lives in Montréal.

Tyler Robert Sheldon
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
tyrsheldon@gmail.com

Author Bio

Tyler Robert Sheldon has seven poetry collections including Everything is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and When to Ask for Rain (Spartan Press, 2021), a Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist. He is Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review and Poetry Co-Editor of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Pop Culture and Pedagogy, and his work can be found in Dialogue, The Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. He earned his PhD at LSU and his MFA at McNeese State University, and he lives in Baton Rouge.