Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Their other poetry books include the chapbook How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), and the books Personal Science (Tupelo), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). They are an associate professor at UMass Boston where they teach in the MFA program.

Michael Leong is the author of the monograph Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020) as well as several volumes of poetry, including, most recently, Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018). He teaches in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts and currently serves on the editorial board of American Literature and the advisory board of Journal of Modern Literature.

Zeno Scott is a wordsmith, educator, & woodworker based in Los Angeles. Zeno’s work interrogates the many paradoxes of ‘identity’ through a dialectical use of the polyphonic.

Zeno is the singer and songwriter for the agenre band, Yer Trash & the loving father to the Black cat, Knuckle. Zeno received his Bachelor’s Degree from Wesleyan University and is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at CalArts.

Tatum Howey is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Integrated Media at CalArts. Their work has been published online by Lemon Hound, Wonder, and in print with The Capilano Review. In 2019 they were invited to present at New York’s Performa Commissions as part of a week-long pedagogical workshop for Unlimited Bodies.

Jennie Park (Art, Creative Writing MFA '22) is a Korean American artist, writer and curator interested in interdisciplinarity and integrated approaches to healing and honesty. She has contributed to LA-based Artillery and other arts publications, and her film and art works have received awards at the local and national level.

Ica Sadagat is a poet and essayist immersed in textual impact, pleasure/play, and question marks. She’s published in Apogee Journal, Nightboat Books, and TAYO Literary Magazine.

Currently, Ica is a Truman Capote Fellow and MFA candidate at CalArts, where they co-created and co-organize the HYPERLINK reading series. Ica received her BA at The New School studying Literature, Psychology, Race & Ethnicity, and Gender Studies. A former youth counselor, they’ve performed and/or instructed at The Philippine Center, The New School, Studio Museum 127, Princeton University, Brooklyn Museum, and more. Before and beyond that, Ica surfs.

Yasmina Price is a writer, researcher, and PhD student in the Departments of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. She focuses on anti-colonial African cinema and the work of visual artists across the Black diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. She has interviewed filmmakers and participated in panels on black film and revolutionary cultural production organized by The Maysles Documentary Center, International Documentary Association, New York Film Festival and more. Recent writing has appeared in The Current (Criterion), The New Inquiry, The New York Review of Books, the Metrograph Journal, Vulture, Hyperallergic and MUBI.

Jimmy Vega is the son of Mexican immigrants, a Chicano LA-based poet, writer, educator, and bookseller. He holds a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from UCLA and is an MFA candidate in the School of Critical Studies, Creative Writing Program at CalArts. He is the Operations Manager at Beyond Baroque literary arts/center and is 1/3 co-curator of HYPERLINK. Jimmy sings out loud when he’s gridlocked somewhere in Los Angeles traffic.

Julia is a knitter, educator and writer from Bogotá, Colombia. Her current work is a personal exploration of how these crafts are entwined in raveling the self. She recently became part of a sewing circle in Bogotá that works to thread together women’s experiences and accounts of violence in Colombia, mostly through patchwork. Before embarking in the MFA creative writing program at CalArts, she taught English as part of Teach for Colombia (Enseña por Colombia) and worked at a charter school organization. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, with a concentration in Math, from Columbia University in New York.

Kenneth Reveiz is a poet and screenwriter from Queens, NY.

A Yale graduate and former elected official in New Haven, CT, Kenneth is a Truman Capote Literary Trust Fellow at the California Institute of the Arts, where they co-created the MFA in Creative Writing’s HYPERLINK reading series.

Kenneth’s debut poetry collection won the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize. Fence Books will publish in Summer 2022, accompanied by a national tour.

Rosa Evangelina (Music-Creative Writing MFA ‘22) is a Mexican-American vocalist, poet, composer, and performance artist based in Los Angeles. Her work investigates the performative capabilities of voice, text, and movement, often drawing from language and energetic traces left behind by her ancestors, including her past self. She is a recipient of the Mercedes and Gabriel García Marquez Scholarship and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund. Formerly undocumented, Rosa grew up in Ontario, California and has also lived in Brazil and Mozambique. She holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Literature from Harvard and is a first-generation college graduate in her family.

Chance Vernon is a writer and playwright interested in gender construction, familial structures, and fantastical spaces. Chance is a 2021 MFA candidate in the CalArts Creative Writing Program and was recently awarded the 2021/22 CalArts Critical Studies Post Graduate Fellowship. Her play Mama's Little Monsters will be produced in May through CalArts Thurs.Night and in June by the Washington DC theatre company The Quarantine Players.

Aaron J is a poet and artist based in Los Angeles. Their work is based on ekphrastic writing and photography in order to process the unrelenting forward nature of time.

Ruth Johnson (Film Directing-Creative Writing MFA ‘22) is a writer, director, actor, editor, and much, much more. Currently, she considers herself a jack of all trades and a master of none, but she’s hoping her time at CalArts will help her become a master in at least one of the above fields…or something else. Ruth also works as an entertainment journalist for Comics Beat and creates video essays when she can.

Aaraf Afzal was invented in Dhaka, Bangladesh at some point in the early 90s. His work spans a multitude of mediums: from superhero series to short films to virtual photography and beyond, Aaraf dabbles in it all. He is the author of dystopian novel Re: Revolution, and is currently at work on his second sci-fi/fantasy manuscript, The Great Will of the Universe as his CalArts MFA Thesis. In his spare time, he develops a series of video essays analyzing the storytelling language of video games out of his home in Valencia, CA.

Shirley Kim-Ryu is a filmmaker and a poet who traverses the mediums of performance, moving image and poetry. Kim-Ryu’s work is motivated by the non-gendered oneness, a borderless corporeal experience across gender and borders.

Jen D’Mello is an MFA in Creative Writing Candidate in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. D’Mello’s work reflects the possibilities of the everyday to incite sensual, skeptical and imaginative collisions, cohering primarily around experimentation with sound and its significance as a medium of queer social life. Drawing upon developments in queer studies, (soma)tic poetics, speculative nonfiction, quantum theory and mechanics, music and sound studies, and theories of thresholds, multiplicity, and the Undercommons, D’Mello creates work consisting of both writing and sound with the intent of making things that have the capacity to listen.

Maryam Kazeem is a writer based in Lagos. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in publications including Literary Hub, Joyland, Apogee, Catapult, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Zina Saro-Wiwa is an artist working primarily with video but also photography, sculpture, sound and food. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York as well as running a practise in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where she founded the contemporary art gallery Boys’ Quarters Project Space for which she regularly curates. Saro-Wiwa is one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Global Thinkers of 2016 recognized for her work in the Niger Delta. She was Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn 2016-2017 and in April 2017 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.

Sam Creely (right) is a writer, editor, bookmaker, and educator living in Los Angeles. Their work engages anticolonial and queer methodologies, turning syntax against institutional systems of logic or sense. Their research in early modern textile history pursues questions about the implication of trade language in English lexical semantics and morphology. They are a founding co-editor of DanceNotes Chaplet Series, and teach at ArtCenter College of Design and California Institute of the Arts.

Pia Sazani (left) is a writer, artist, and teacher invested in the speculative capacities of the sentence. She co-founded and co-edits DanceNotes Chaplet Series, and her work has been published by Denver Quarterly, Heavy Breathing, Vallum, and Wolfman Books. Most recently, she has written movement scores about erosion and become very serious about quilting.

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Using a range of

rhetorical and often dogmatic narratives and texts, Beech’s work poses questions and propositions for what a realist art can be in today’s culture; that is, a work that can articulate a comprehension of reality without the terminal mirror of a human identity that is used to picture it. Beech has shown her artwork and presented her writing internationally including; Artericambi Galerie, This Time, a video commission for the Remai Modern, Intolerable Art, a keynote for the Research Conference on Practice, "Exploding Horror," for the book Diseases of the Head, Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy, and she is also a contributing editor of Construction Sites for Possible Worlds.

Tisa Bryant is the author of hybrid essay collection Unexplained Presence. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborates with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book visual mixtape series. Her writing has recently appeared in Lana Turner, Made in L.A. 2018, I Stand in My Place With My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Art at The New School, and Letters to the Future: BLACK Women/RADICAL Writing. Her next book, Residual, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She lives in Los Angeles.