July Westhale, Wryly T. McCutchen, Jennifer Cox-Shah, Kenan Ince, JD Scott
July Westhale is the award-winning author of Via Negativa, Trailer Trash (selected for the 2016 Kore Press Book Prize), The Cavalcade, and Occasionally Accurate Science. Her most recent poetry can be found in The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, The Indianapolis Review, Vinyl, Tupelo Quarterly, RHINO, Lunch Ticket, and Quarterly West. Her essays have been nominated for Best American Essays and have appeared in McSweeney’s, Autostraddle, and The Huffington Post. She is also a staff writer at The Establishment. She was the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow and is the 2019 Writer-in-Residence at Alley Cat Books.
Wryly T. McCutchen is a quadruple scorpio, hybrid writer, performer, and community educator. In 2018 they were a Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry. Their work has appeared in Foglifter, Tiferet Journal, and Nat. Brut. They hold a dual genre MFA from Antioch University. My Ugly and Other Love Snarls (University of Hell Press) is their debut poetry collection.
Jennifer Cox-Shah is ready to slip into her second Chicago summer and lives with her wife and dog (who may actually be a fox or a cat but TBD). She earned her Master’s in Literature and Creative Writing at Harvard University and was a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow at the Retreat for Emerging Voices. She has been published in Emerge: 2018 Lambda Anthology, freeze frame fiction, Microchondria III: Short Stories Collected by the Harvard Book Store, The Passed Note, The A3 Review, Crab Fat Magazine, Pocket Change Magazine, and Streetlight Magazine.
Kenan Ince is a queer, Turkish-American mathematician, poet, and organizer from Texas living on occupied Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute territory (so-called Salt Lake City). Their work was featured in The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Word Riot, and the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America, among others. They are the recipient of scholarships to the Antioch Writers’ Workshop and Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat and winner of the Utah Pride Center’s Poetry and Prose Contest.
JD Scott is the most recent winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, which will result in a debut short story collection published by Lake Forest College and distributed by Northwestern University. Scott’s debut poetry collection, Mask for Mask, is also forthcoming from New Rivers Press. Scott’s work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Accolades include being awarded a Lambda Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellowship, attending the Poetry Foundation’s inaugural Poetry Incubator, and being awarded residencies at the Millay Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and Writers at the Eyrie.
