Caprice Gray is a lifelong New Yorker. She has a a Master of Science from Harvard University and an MFA in Writing from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Her work explores themes of Otherness, alienation, and belonging. She has been longlisted for the 2023 First Pages Prize and 2024 Granum Prize, and hails from traditional lands of the Wecksquaesgeek people, Harlem New York.
Vanessa Mártir is a widely published multi-genre writer who learned how to tell stories from the women in her family. Picture it: an assembly line of doñas making pasteles as they tell raucous stories about their lives–the men they loved and hated, betrayals, heartbreaks, the joy they found and made, the children they raised–they laughed with their entire bodies, loudly, heads thrown back, breasts and hips jiggling. They had no shame and no worry for this brief time. These are the women Vanessa channels when she writes.
Monique Quintana is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has been supported by Yaddo, The Community of Writers, Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Storyknife. You can find her at moniquequintana.com
Yaccaira Salvatierra is a poet, translator, and dedicated educator for over 20 years while raising her two sons as a single parent. She earned her BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz, an MA at San Jose State University, and an MFA at Randolph College. She received the Dorrit Sibley Award for Poetry and the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, Sons of Salt, was deemed one of the “Best Books for Adults 2024” by the New York Public Library. She lives in Oakland, where she teaches literacy and poetry to youth.
Laura-Gray Street, author of Pigment and Fume and Just Labor, and co-editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, and Attached to the Living World, is a Black Earth Institute fellow and teaches creative writing and edits Revolute at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Renae Watchman (Diné or Navajo) is originally from New Mexico but lives in Canada. She’s an associate professor in the Indigenous Studies Department at McMaster University, where she teaches and researches Indigenous literatures and Indigenous film. Her recent book is Restoring Relations Through Stories: from Dinétah to Denendeh.
Storyknife Writers Retreat 