LAURA PEGRAM,
EDITOR IN CHIEF

Laura Pegram is a multidisciplinary artist who is influencing a new generation of aspiring writers. Author, educator, and a jazz vocalist whose cabaret performance teamed her with jazz pianist, Donald Smith, Ms. Pegram is also a painter. Her richly hued vibrant murals are part of several private collections. She has worked as a Development Associate at Scholastic Productions, Inc., as an Instructor at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center and as an Acting Director / Instructor at the John Oliver Killens Young Writers Program. 

graham akhurst,
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Graham Akhurst is an Aboriginal writer hailing from the Kokomini of Northern Queensland. He has been published widely in Australia and America for poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction. His debut novel Borderland will be released in 2022 with Hachette Australia. Graham is the recipient of the W.G. Walker Fulbright Scholar to complete an MFA in fiction at Hunter College, CUNY. He has an Honours degree in creative writing and an Mphil in creative writing from the University of Queensland where he was also an Associate Lecturer in Indigenous Studies. He currently lives and studies in New York.

nicole Dennis-Benn,
senior fiction editor

Nicole Dennis-Benn is an award-winning novelist whose books place working class Jamaicans, especially women, at the center of the universal human experience. Her debut novel, HERE COMES THE SUN, a New York Times Notable Book of 2016 and most recently, listed as a New York Times Most Notable Book of the decade, followed the lives of four women living in a fictional community in Montego Bay and explored timely themes of generational trauma, colorism, gender, class, and sexuality. Her second novel, Patsy, a Today Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, explored the lives of a mother and daughter grappling with immigration and identity. Dennis-Benn’s novels have been translated to multiple languages, including French, Portuguese, Korean, German and Italian, and are sold all over the globe, including but not limited to, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Kenya and France. NPR has called Dennis-Benn an indispensable novelist whereas Time Magazine has described her stories as filling a literary void. While Dennis-Benn currently lives in NYC with her wife and two young sons, Jamaica is her muse.

Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Vineyard Town, Kingston, and is a graduate of St. Andrew High School for Girls. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Cornell University, Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She regularly mentors emerging writers, with an emphasis on those from the Caribbean, through the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop, for which she is the Founding Director.

ANITA FELICELLI,
SENIOR FICTION EDITOR

Anita Felicelli was born in India and grew up in Northern California. She is a fiction writer, poet, and critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Anita is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation grant, the recipient of a 2015 Kweli scholarship, and an alumna of Voices of Our Nations (VONA). She is the author of a poetry collection "Letters to an Albatross" (Blaze Vox, 2010). Her short stories have twice been finalists for the Glimmer Train awards and her nonfiction has received two awards from The San Francisco Peninsula Press Club. Anita's work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Brain Child, India Currents, Blackbird, Juked, Strangelet Journal, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at the South Asian blog The Aerogram. Anita triple-majored at UC Berkeley, holds a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, and worked as a litigator for a decade.

ESTELLA GONZALEZ,
SENIOR FICTION EDITOR

Estella Gonzalez was born and raised in East Los Angeles, which inspires most of her writing. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Kweli, Aster(ix) and Huizache and has been anthologized in Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature and Kaleidescope: Martindale Literary Award Winners 1988-2006.  She received a Pushcart Prize “Special Mention” and was selected a “Reading Notable” for The Best American Non-Required Reading.

phuong anh le,
contributing editor

Born and raised in Son tay, Vietnam, Phuong Anh Le was educated at Princeton and Columbia Universities. She has worked as a free-lance journalist and translator in Hanoi and as an international lawyer in New York. Speaking four languages and having lived on four continents, she is currently based in Abuja, Nigeria, where she’s working on her first novel and a collection of stories set in Vietnam. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Warren Wilson College.

tracey Lewis-Giggetts,
associate editor

Tracey Lewis-Giggetts is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Philadelphia and founding publisher of NewSeason Books and Media, an independent press and content creation company based out of the metro Philadelphia Area. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from the University of Kentucky, an M.B.A. in Marketing from Montclair State University; an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Fairleigh-Dickinson University.

bahar mirhosseini,
contributing editor

Bahar Mirhosseini has worked as a public defender in the U.S. and with public defenders overseas. She is a VONA alum and a recipient of Hedgebrook’s Women Authoring Change Fellowship, one made in honor of Libyan lawyer and activist Salwa Bugaighis. During law school, she received the Haywood Burns Fellowship in Civil and Human Rights from the City University of New York School of Law. Bahar was first introduced to Kweli Journal during a fifth anniversary reading series the journal hosted with Jennine Capó Crucet in East Harlem, New York. She is working on a collection of short stories and a memoir.  

ANNA QU,
NONFICTION EDITOR

Anna Qu was born in Wenzhou, China and grew up in New York. Her nonfiction has appeared in Kweli, The Threepenny Review, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Kartika Review, X0Jane.com, Jezebel.com, and Free Range Nonfiction. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College and spent two years working in publishing. Currently, she is working on a memoir and lives in Brooklyn.

JODI M. SAVAGE,
Contributing editor

Jodi M. Savage is an employment discrimination and disability rights attorney. Jodi writes about race, gender, feminism, faith, and Alzheimer’s disease. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Catapult, The Establishment, Kweli and Women’s Studies Quarterly.

Jodi graduated from Barnard College and Seton Hall University School of Law. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Jodi can be found online at www.jodimsavage.com and on Twitter (@macreflections

CYNTHIA DEWI OKA,
POETRY EDITOR

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). Her work has appeared in ESPNW, Hyperallergic, Guernica, Poets.org, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a contributor to the anthologies Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (OR Books, 2018), Who Will Speak for America (Temple University Press, 2018), and What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, edited by Martín Espada. Her work has also been selected for the Best of Kweli: An Aster(ix) Anthology (Blue Sketch Press, 2017), edited by Angie Cruz and Laura Pegram. 

As a 2017 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grantee, she partnered with Asian Arts Initiative to create Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets based in Philadelphia. A three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, she has received scholarships from VONA and the Vermont Studio Center, the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor's Prize in Poetry, and the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award. She is originally from Bali, Indonesia.

VINCENT TORO,
POETRY EDITOR

Vincent Toro has an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University. He is winner of the 2015 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and is recipient of both a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. His poems have been published in Kweli, The Buenos Aires Review, The Acentos Review, Codex, The Journal, Matter, The Ostrich Review, The Cortland Review, The Caribbean Writer, and in the anthologies CHORUS, and The Waiting Room Reader 2. His play “21” won the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award and was staged at the Spanish Repertory Theater. From 2006-2011, Vincent was Theater Arts Director at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. During his tenure there he won The San Antonio Theater Councils Golden Globe for Direction of a Drama. He is a member of the Macondo Writer’s Foundation and serves on the board of GlobalWrites, a non-profit dedicated to promoting literacy through integration of technology and performing arts in schools throughout the U.S. Vincent teaches at CUNY’s Bronx Community College and is a poet in the schools for the Dodge Poetry Foundation and the Dreamyard Project. His collection, “Stereo.Island.Mosaic.” was released in January 2016 from Ahsahta Press.

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Contributing Editor

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria, and his work has appeared in Kweli, AGNI, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, The Evergreen Review, amongst other literary journals.

His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Centre, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University's Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Centre in the Redwoods California, and Island Institute.

Kọ́láwọlé studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. A graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, he returned to VCFA to join the Faculty of the low-residency MFA program. His novel is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins. Kọ́láwọlé teaches full-time at Pennsylvania State University, where he is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English.