Stella Peg Carruthers, Doug May, Akua Lezli Hope
Stella Peg Carruthers is an emerging creative and commercial writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. She has published poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction both in her home country and internationally. She also works as a freelance copywriter and content creator. She is working on her debut novel. Alongside her work as a writer, she is also a mixed media and textile artist and teaches adult education classes in sustainable living. A strong believer in the power of creativity as a positive force, Stella lives this truth through her writing and art practices.
Doug May has worked a lot of different jobs, everything from production typing and proofreading to answering the phone, delivering flowers, emptying bedpans, mopping floors, and stocking display shelves. His poetry has appeared in Breath and Shadow, Wordgathering, Raw Art Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cathexis Northwest, and other disability and poetry publications. He has below average IQ (83 to 86 WAIS and Stanford Binet scores) as well as ADHD and has written a memoir about his life as a differently-abled American.
Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker using sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments, and peace. Her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest award winner), Them Gone, Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (2021 Elgin Award winner), and Stratospherics (@Quarantine Public Library). She edited NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the history-making first (2021). A third-generation New Yorker and paraplegic, she exhibits her artwork, sings songs from Japanese anime, practices her soprano saxophone, and prays for the cessation of suffering for all.
Tyler Champion
Tyler Champion is a freelance illustrator and designer. He grew up in Kentucky before moving to New Jersey to develop his passion at The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. After graduating in 2010, he headed back south to Nashville, TN, where he currently resides with his girlfriend, Melissa, and his son, Jude. Tyler has produced work for magazines, comics, design companies, and children’s books, including work for Sony, F(r)iction, Capstone Publishing, and Tell-A-Graphics.
