‘Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. Her debut collection of stories, Ghostroots, was a finalist for the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. 

Jennifer Dickinson, a graduate of Hollins University, is a book coach and writing teacher for women. Her fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, Isele Magazine, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers magazine. Her middle grade debut novel is forthcoming Spring 2026. Connect with Jennifer at jenniferdickinsonwrites.com

Alisha Drabek, MFA, PhD is a Sugpiaq Alutiiq author and artist from Kodiak Island, Alaska, living on Kaua’i. She has published several nonfiction and children’s books. She serves on the boards of Afognak Native Corporation and See Stories, an Alaska nonprofit that builds community through film and story. See alishadrabek.com

Heid E. Erdrich‘s new book is Verb Animate: Poems and Prompts from Collaborative Acts. Her honors include a National Poetry Series award for Little Big Bully. Heid edited New Poets of Native Nations and co-edited Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature. Heid is Ojibwe. She teaches online through The Loft.  www.heiderdrich.com 

Elizabeth Lee (she/her) is a Korean American fiction and nonfiction writer based out of Santa Fe. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Pleiades Magazine, Santa Fe Noir, Vestal Review, and Unbroken Journal, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award.

Amanda E. Machado is a queer nonbinary Latine writer, teacher and facilitator whose work has been published in Guernica, The Atlantic, Adroit Journal, Slate, and many others. They write on topics like Latine ancestry, gender violence, queer sexuality, nature, and the intersections between race, travel, and outdoor recreation.

Sibylla Nash is a multi-genre author and freelance writer. Based in Los Angeles, she holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Her work has appeared in LitHub, The Chicago Tribune, Essence, and others. She’s received support for her writing from the Highlights Foundation and Women Who Submit.

Kellie Richardson is a queer, Black writer and artist based in Tacoma, Washington. Her work centers Black humanity, and meditations on healing and memory. A former Tacoma Poet Laureate, Kellie has released two books, What Us Is and The Art of Naming My Pain both published by Blue Cactus Press.

Alisa Alering is the author of the novel “Smothermoss,” (Tin House, 2024) a Shirley Jackson Award finalist that the New York Times Book Review calls “deliciously weird…a compulsive journey through a wild, unknowable landscape and the wilder hearts of young girls.” A former librarian and science and technology reporter, they grew up in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania. They find the natural world equal parts comforting and terrifying.

Stephanie Brown is a Black speculative fiction writer creating stories about Earth and space, home and the unknown. Her stories have been published in Augur Magazine and Astral: Alien Fiction. She holds an MFA in English and was named the 2025 Mary Ellen State Fellow at Storyknife Writers Retreat.

Heather Litnauwista Metrokin Cannon was raised in Kodiak surrounded by her extended family. She learned harvesting & storytelling, the foundation for her art, from her grandfather Walter and grandmother Feckla. Heather is dedicated to preserving Sugpiaq art forms including storytelling. She is a member of the Sun’aq Tribe and holds an OEC in Alutiiq Language from UAA. 

Cherilyn Chin is a marine biologist, children’s book author and freelance science journalist. She has an award-winning ocean conservation blog, Ocean of Hope. Her life purpose is to bring to light the plight of our oceans and to reconnect people to nature. 

Geeta Kothari edited ‘Did My Mama Like to Dance?’ and Other Stories about Mothers and Daughters, and she is the author of I Brake for Moose and Other Stories. Her most recent essay, “To the Man who Poisoned My Mother,” was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2022.

Amy Ludwig lives in Los Angeles. Her stage adaptation of Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street” has had over 35 productions nationwide. As a director in Chicago, she developed numerous new plays and created original site-specific works. She is writing a historical play to be performed with lantern slides.

Dr. Renee White Eyes is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Leadership department at Northern Arizona University. In her research, she draws on her experience and expertise of admissions, recruiting, and community outreach to investigate questions about American Indian experience in higher education. 

A prize-winning journalist and essayist, Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by The Paris Review. Deemed “whip-smart” by the Washington Post and a “brilliant debut” by the Seattle Times, Subduction was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards. Red Hen Press will release her memoir Desire Lines on October 6, 2026.

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.

Join us on Thursday, June 19 at 6pm Alaska time for Live from Storyknife featuring June’s writers in residence. The session will be live on Zoom and the recording will be posted on this page after the reading.

Abegunde is a memory keeper, poet, and ancestral priest. While at Storyknife she is drafting a healing text for those who conduct field work at sites of violence and genocide. Her writings on her experiences in Juba, South Sudan have been published in the Massachusetts Review, North Meridian Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.

Clementine Bordeaux is Sicangu Lakota Oyate (Rosebud Sioux Tribe) and grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Currently, Clementine is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside, supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. Clementine’s research and writing interests include Lakota creative practices and community-based participatory projects. 

Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful and How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2022, 2019). She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts low-residency MFA and is an assistant professor at UMass Amherst. Abigail is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village.

Angie Chuang writes in many nonfiction forms, from memoir to literary journalism to scholarly research. She’s currently at Storyknife working on a memoir in essays called The Unbecomings. Her first memoir, The Four Words for Home, was published in 2014. She lives in Denver and is on the journalism faculty at University of Colorado Boulder. 

Mary Leauna Christensen’s (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) poetry can be found in Southern Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, and Gettysburg Review, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Common and in Black Warrior Review. She was also named a 2022 Indigenous Nations Poets fellow for the inaugural In-Na-Po retreat. 

Kirsten Imani Kasai is an Assistant Professor of Popular Fiction at Emerson College in Boston. She’s the author of three novels: The House of Erzulie (Shade Mountain Press, 2018), Ice Song (Del Rey, 2009) and Tattoo (Del Rey, 2011). According to Foreword Reviews, “Kirsten makes the macabre beautiful.”

Alyssa Velazquez is a curator, playwright, and has written for Material Intelligence, The Establishment, Burnaway, AutoStraddle, and Carnegie Museum of Art. She is an inaugural fellow of Critical Insight through the American Theatre magazine, a 2024 Lambda Literary fellow, and was invited to join The Playwrights Cohort at PlayPenn, Class of 2024-25. Since 2022, Velazquez has also held residences at Bischoff Inn and Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh.