Bazeed is a multi–award winning Egyptian immigrant, poet, playwright, performance artist, stage actor, editor, curator, massage therapist, and cook, living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed in festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Their first play, peace camp org, an autobiographical queer anti-Zionist musical(ish) comedy about summer camp, is published by Oberon Books, UK, and won them the Andrew & Eleanor McGlinchee Prize in 2018; the Fresh Fruit Festival’s Spirit Award in 2019; and the Dramatists Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award for Creative Promise in 2021. Their poetry and prose have been published by Poetry; Palette Poetry; Driftwood Press; Mizna; The Margins; and The Evergreen Review; among others.

They’ve been supported by residencies, fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sundance Institute, the Arab American National Museum, Asian American Writers Workshop, the Center for Fiction, Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation, Lambda Literary, LMCC, Queer Art Mentorship, and Trans Lab, among others. To procrastinate from facing the blank page, Mariam curates and runs a monthly(ish) salon and open mic in Brooklyn, and is a slow student of Arabic music.

Vani is a queer South Asian poet and research librarian. Their favorite spaces for making art are usually insterstitial: trains, buses, waiting rooms, beaches, and time stolen away from their job. Vani writes for the romance of friendships and the end of empires. They live in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn NY.

noam keim (they/them) is a trauma worker, medicine maker and flâneur freak. Their non-fiction writing weaves themes close to their heart: reverence to the land, antizionism, queerness, colonialism, plants, abolition. They are a Lambda Literary ’22 Fellow, an RWW ’23 Fellow, a Tin House ’23 Fellow, a Sewanee ’23 contributor and a Periplus ’23 Fellow mentored by Grace Talusan. Their first essay collection the Land is Holy came out via @radix.coop in May 2024. Connect via @noamkeim or thelandisholy.com.

Becca Khalil is an actor, poet, director, and overall creator from Philly living in LA. Becca is Egyptian and is currently directing “Handala” a celebration of Palestine, starring Myriam Ali-Ahmad, in the world’s largest Solo Fest, United Solo, on Oct 11th here in NYC at Theatre Row. All proceeds from Handala go to Gaza.

bes is is an experimenter, not an expert. their work embraces fragmentation, improvisation, dissonance, abstraction and radical translation as tools towards a future Otherwise. a transMad* MashJar poet-performer, researcher, bricoleur, bes runs a zine and broadside project called Pickled Sugarcane Press. You can find them elbow deep in soil in a garden somewhere.