Creative Process and Writing Life

Gloria is a Colombian American writer, translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy. She is the author of This is the Year, Your Biome Has Found You, and Danzirly, which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award. Her other honors include an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Hedgebrook Fellowship, being a Macondista, Highlights Foundation’s Diverse Verse Fellowship, Lumina’s Multilingual Writing Award, and a part of Las Musas. She is proud to be St. Pete's first Latina poet laureate and she enjoys working with other writers and creatives.

Bridgett is the author of the critically-acclaimed memoir The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers, a New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Pick” and an Entertainment Weekly “Must Read.” She has been invited to speak at numerous venues about her memoir and its historical context. She teaches creative and film writing at Baruch College, CUNY.

Matthew is a novelist, scholar, and Korean adoptee who has written and spoken widely on the subjects of adoption, race, Asian masculinity and parenting. His acclaimed first novel,The Hundred-Year Flood, was an Amazon Bestseller and, among other honors, a Best Book of the season at Buzzfeed, Refinery29, and Gawker.

Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, won the 2023 PEN Open Book Award. Hafizah is also the author of the debut poetry collection Un-American, nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award, a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize.

Kai Harris is the author of the acclaimed debut novel What the Fireflies Knew (Tiny Reparations, 2022), a Silicon Valley 2023 Read, A Marie Claire Book Club pick as well as being an NAACP Image Award nominee and longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. She is a writer and educator from Detroit, Michigan, who uses her voice to uplift the Black community through realistic fiction centered on the Black experience.

Ladee is an award-winning author and scholar. Her critically-acclaimed novel, The Talented Ribkins, was awarded the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for the Debut Novel and the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, among many other honors, and garnered her an appearance on Seth Meyers.

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is an award-winning historian, journalist, activist and commentator whose work examines the intersections of race, gender, power, and freedom, specifically focusing on the lives of enslaved and free black women. Amrita is the author of the award-winning Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston as well as The Vice President’s Black Wife: Resurrecting Julia Chinn, published by Ferris & Ferris in October 2023.

Award-winning journalist Danyel Smith is author of the critically-acclaimed Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop (One World / Penguin Random House, April 2022). Danyel is also creator/host of the popular Black Girl Songbook, a podcast that centers the sounds and stories of black women (Spotify Original).

Kristen is The New York Times best-selling author of Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), as well as a queer fiction and essay writer and a social media genius. Kristen’s unique voice focuses on humor writing, LGBTQ issues, and Florida.

Akemi Johnson is the author of Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa. A former Fulbright scholar in Okinawa, Akemi has written about the island, along with issues of race, identity, history, and culture, for The Nation, NPR, and other publications.