The Black Ecstatic

Airea D. Matthews is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her work has appeared in American Poet, Best American Poets, 2015, Calalloo, Harvard Review, and elsewhere.

Roger Reeves received an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English from the University of Texas, Austin. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry, and the Indiana Review, among other publications, and he was included in Best New Poets 2009. He is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a 2014-2015 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University. King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013) is Reeves’s first book.

Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Carribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Jamal T. Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. Named by Teen Vogue as one of the “coolest queers on the internet,” Lewis is also known as ‘fatfemme,’ a moniker that encapsulates life at the intersection of fat and femme identity – “spaces that people are afraid to occupy,” she names. Lewis’s work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, TriBeca,  & Tate Modern.