Paris is Still Burning

Danez Smith is a proud Cave Canem Fellow, two-time Pushcart Nominee, Best New Poets Nominee, survivor and an avid twerker. He thinks you look good today. Danez started writing because of slams and necessity. He placed 6th in the world at the 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam and is the 2013 Rustbelt Midwest Regional Slam Champion. He is the author of hands on ya knees, a chapbook. His writing has appeared in Gertrude, Devil's Lake, PANK, the Cortland Review, Anti-, and elsewhere. Smith is an assistant editor for Muzzle magazine. Smith’s first full-length collection of poetry is [insert] boy (Yes Yes Books). Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Poetry Editor for the LA Review of Books, writes, “The next time someone tells you spoken word poets can’t make poems come to life on the page, send them to Danez Smith’s [insert] boy, a remarkable debut collection that puts that tired notion to bed once and for all…these poems interrogate the ways the body not only inhabits but actually becomes public and private space… Danez Smith lays down the gauntlet for all of us to speak our deepest truths with more elegance, more ferocity, and almost more beauty than a reader can bear.”

David Tomas Martinez's work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Forklift, Gulf Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Spork Press, Toe Good, and many others. Martinez has been featured or written about in Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, NPR's All Things Considered, Poetry, Buzzfeed, and many others. He earned his MFA at San Diego State University, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Houston's Creative Writing program, and is the Reviews and Interviews Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His debut collection of poetry, Hustle, won the New England Book Festival's prize in poetry, the Devil's Kitchen Reading Award, and honorable mention in the Antonio Cisneros Del Moral prize. He is the 2015 winner of the InPrint Verlaine Poetry Prize.

Dawn Lundy Martin was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering. A founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat) investigates the ways in which language claims absolute knowledge and draws a box around lived experience. Martin writes poems that seek out moments when the box buckles, or breaks, poems that suggest there is more. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life continues Martin's investigation into what is produced in the interstices between the body, experience, and language, and how alternative narratives can yield some other knowledge about what it means to be black (or female, or queer) in contemporary America.

Justin Phillip Reed is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. His poetry appears in Anti-, Rattle, and Connotation Press, and is forthcoming in Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. A History of Flamboyance, his debut collection of poetry, is forthcoming from YesYes Books.