Kevin Bertolero is the founding editor of both & Change Poetry and Ghost City Press. He holds degrees in literature from SUNY Potsdam and the University of New Hampshire, as well as an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Kevin is the author of three chapbooks -- Modern Thought, Soft Boy (Ghost City Press; 2016, 2017), and Love Poems (Bottlecap Press, 2020); two collections of poetry -- From the Estuary to the Offing (Ghost City, 2015), In Passing (& Change, 2025); as well as a nonfiction book, Forever in Transition: Queer Futurist Aesthetics in Gay Cinema (Another New Calligraphy, 2021). His work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Assaracus, Hanging Loose, Cape Cod Review, Post Road, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Mary Bonina is the author of My Father’s Eyes: A Memoir, and two collections of poetry—Living Proof  and Clear Eye Tea —all published by Cervena Barva Press. In collaboration with Paul Sayed, she wrote the poems “Grace in the Wind,” the inspiration for his composition of the same title, written for piano, cello, and soprano. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, and she has been a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in residence several times since 2002 when she was the finalist for the Goldfarb Family fellowship. She was awarded a VCCA-France residency at Moulin a Nef in Auvillar, France. Bonina is a member and, for more than a decade, served on the Board of Directors of the Writers Room of Boston. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, Mark Pawlak.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. He has also authored four  previous chapbooks, most recently GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Sam Herschel Wein. Chen’s work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA program at New England College.

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His honors include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for poetry, a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, and awards from Columbia Journal and The Florida Review. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Narrative, West Branch, and in such anthologies as Best New Poets, Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, and They Said: An Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. His creative creative nonfiction appears in Boulevard, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He teaches private creative writing classes online and is an Editorial Assistant for the Seneca Review. Christopher lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.

​Brock Clarke is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently the short story collection The Price of the Haircut, and has won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, and a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, Southern Review, The Believer, and the New England Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His eighth book—the novel I Am Calvin Bledsoe —was published in September 2019. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Chair of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.

Jaed Coffin  is the author of Roughhouse Friday, a memoir about the year he won the middleweight title of a barroom boxing show in Juneau, Alaska. He's also the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, which chronicles the summer he spent as a Buddhist monk in his mother's village in Thailand. A regular contributor to Down East Magazine, Jaed's essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Nautilus, The Sun and many other journals and publications. He teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine with his wife and two daughters. For more information visit his website here. 

Cecilia Corrigan is an NYC based writer and performer whose work blends literary form with somatic movement and comedic camp. Her first volume of poetry, Titanic (&Now Press) was awarded the Madeline P. Plonsker Prize. Other publications include the chapbooks Cream (Capricious) and True Beige (Ugly Duckling Press). Her work in TV & film includes writing, acting, and directing for independent projects (Crush, Le Balm, Carma with a C) and several projects currently in production development. She was commissioned by Bedlam theater for her contemporary adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope, reimagined as a queer love triangle set in 2020s New York City. She is a member of ATDA, Angela Trimbur’s anti-technique ballet company. 

Nicole Counts is an associate editor at One World, an imprint of Random House with the mission of providing a home for authors—novelists, essayists, memoirists, poets, journalists, thinkers and activists—who seek to challenge the status quo. She has worked with Fatimah Asghar, Morgan Parker, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Donovan X. Ramsey, Danielle Geller, Haroon Ullah, Mychal Denzel Smith, Lisa Shannon, Ryan Berg, and others. Nicole Counts started her career in marketing and publicity at PublicAffairs and Nation Books. She is a freelance writer, as well as a facilitator and mentor with Girls Write Now, on the board of Well-Read Black girl, a mentor with Representation Matters Mentorship Program, and a member of POC in publishing. A Jersey native and Philly lover, she lives in Brooklyn. 

Brandon Courtney is a veteran of the United States Navy and the author of This, Sisyphus, Rooms for Rent in the Burning City, The Grief Muscles, and the chapbook, Inadequate Grave. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Colgate University, Juniper Summer Writers’ Institute, and Seaside Writers’ Conference. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Tin House, Boston Review, Guernica, Memorious, The Progressive, and American Literary Review. 

Deirdre Coyle is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, The New Republic, The Texas Observer, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. She works as an editor at a fintech company, and writes a monthly column on videogames for Unwinnable. Originally published by Electric Literature, her essay, “Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me,” caused a lot of people to get mad at her online before being named one of Bustle’s Best Stories by Women in 2017, translated into Italian for Corriere della Sera, and anthologized in several collections. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Kerouac Project, and the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. At five years old, she received a Women’s Equality Day Award from the National Organization for Women, but that’s a long story.

Deirdre was founding staff at Kettle Pond before moving into her role as faculty in 2026.

Kerry D’Agostino started at Curtis Brown, Ltd. in 2011. She now represents literary and upmarket fiction. Her authors include novelists Erin Adams, Andrea Bobotis, Leesa Cross-Smith, Nancy Wayson Dinan, Patricia Grace King, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Joan F. Smith. Kerry is particularly drawn to character-driven work, unconventional plot structures, unreliable narrators, complicated family relationships, and speculative elements that challenge our ways of thinking about the world. Kerry is a graduate of Bowdoin College, Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Columbia Publishing Course. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Literary Agents of Change and previously served as Co-Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Association of American Literary Agents. After ten years in Brooklyn, Kerry now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York with her family.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of I NEED MUSIC, as well a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture; a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion; and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. He is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.

Jaclyn Gilbert received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and BA from Yale University. She is the recipient of a research fellowship from the New York Public Library, a 2019 artist in residence at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, a 2023 and 2025 fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, and a contributor to the Bread Loaf & Tin House Conferences. Her work has appeared in Post Road Magazine, Tin House, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.  She has led writing workshops at the Valhalla Correctional Facility, and the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Most recently, she founded Drift(less) Literary. Late Air (Little A, 2018) was her first novel; her second, Butter Road (Acre Books, October 2026), was available for special advanced release/ pre-order at Kettle Pond '26.

Brian Hall grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and attended Harvard College. After getting his bachelor’s degree in English in 1981, he ran away for two years, bicycling and camping in western and eastern Europe. On his return, he wrote his first book, Stealing from a Deep Place: Travels in Southeastern Europe. Seven books have followed, five of them novels. He worked freelance as a journalist for a short time, writing for Travel-Holiday, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. Then for a number of years he managed to live exclusively from his books; now he occasionally teaches at Colgate University. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Chelsea Hodson is the author of the book of essays Tonight I'm Someone Else and the chapbook Pity the Animal. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Bennington College and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Catapult in New York and at Mors Tua Vita Mea in Sezze Romano, Italy.    

Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, the Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, and Caribbean Beat. She is the recipient of residencies, grants, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, Camargo Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, Hedgebrook, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Freya Project. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents. 

Sylvia Jones lectures at George Washington University and serves as poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press —she also reads for Ploughshares. Her debut collection —Television Fathers was released in 2024 through Meekling Press. The follow-up, Dope Calisthenics, will be released this fall with Relegation Books. She earned her MFA from American University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Sandra Lim’s latest book of poetry is The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021). Her previous collections include The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). She is the recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Levis Reading Prize. In 2023, she was named Distinguished University Professor at UMass Lowell, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Born in Seoul, Korea, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ashley Mayne's work has appeared in Fence, Post Road, Juked, Northwest Review, Peripheries, Blight Podcast, Metambesen, and elsewhere. She is the author of novels Mankiller (2014 Dr. Cicero Books), and Tiger (2015), edits fiction for Fence, curates two reading series in the Hudson Valley, and works on an organic farm.​

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​Ashley was founding staff at Kettle Pond before moving into her role as faculty in 2024.

Darin Patterson is a stand-up comedian and comedy writer from Queens, New York. He has performed stand-up in many cities, as well as at numerous festivals & events, including: the Derby City Comedy Festival in Louisville, Kentucky; the Boston Comedy Arts Festival in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Montclair Comedy Festival; and the Montclair Literary Festival in Montclair, NJ, where he served as moderator on the writers panel, "Funny Pages: Books By Comedians and Comedy Writers" in 2019. He currently lives in New Jersey where he co-hosts the long-running Saturday Night Live-focused podcast SNL Nerds.

More on where to see & hear Darin next can be found on his social here.  

Mark Pawlak is a poet, editor, and publisher. He is author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies, most recently Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals. His tenth collection will be published in early 2024. Pawlak’s work has been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems and prose have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The World, among many others. His latest publication is the book-length memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov. Pawlak has been a co-editor/publisher of Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose Magazine and Press for 43 years, and is currently managing editor. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Caroline Rayner is a poet and music writer from Richmond, VA. She is the author of THE MOAN WILDS. Her poetry can be found in Annulet, b l u s h, KEITH LLC, Black Warrior Review, Peach Mag, Shabby Doll House, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she taught composition and creative writing. She also served as assistant managing editor of jubilat. Her essays, reviews, and interviews can be found in Tiny Mix Tapes and elsewhere.

David Ryan is the author of the story collection Animals in Motion and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano: Bookmarked. His fiction is forthcoming, or has appeared, in Conjunctions, Bellevue Literary Review, Esquire, BOMB, Tin House, Fence, Electric Literature, No Tokens, The Encyclopedia Project, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, The Mississippi Review, and elsewhere, and anthologized in WW Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, The Mississippi Review: 30, and Akashic Book's Boston Noir 2: The Classics. Essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Tin House, BookForum, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and in the low residency program at New England College.

Raena Shirali is a poet, teaching artist, and editor from Charleston, South Carolina. She is the author of GILT, winner of the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, she is also the recipient of prizes and honors from VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue. Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Blackbird, Diode, The Nation, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, West Branch, & elsewhere. She recently co-organized We (Too) Are Philly, a summer poetry festival highlighting voices of color, and is currently an organizer for Blue Stoop. She is also a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine and a poetry reader for Vinyl.

Michael J. Seidlinger is a Filipino-American writer and a graduate of George Washington University’s Masters of Business in Publishing program. He is the author of a number of books including The Body Harvest, Anybody Home?, Tekken 5 (Boss Fight Books), among many others. He has written for Wired, Buzzfeed, Polygon, The Believer, and Publishers Weekly, and his work has appeared in Forbes, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, PANK, Hypable, and elsewhere. He teaches at Portland State University and has taught courses and led workshops at Catapult, Kettle Pond, Kenyon Writers Workshop, and Sarah Lawrence College.  Michael is represented by Lane Heymont at The Tobias Literary Agency. He currently lives in Troy, New York.

Kem Joy Ukwu's short story collection, Locked Gray / Linked Blue, published by Kindred Books Imprint of Brain Mill Press, won a 2018 Foreword INDIES Award (Bronze Winner in Literary). Her fiction has appeared in Auburn Avenue, PANK, Jabberwock Review, Carve, and Blue Lake Review, among other literary publications. Her TV Script, POWER OUT, won the Grand Prize for the 60-Minute Pilot Teleplay Competition of the 2025 Mystic Film Festival, was an Official Selection for the 2023 Essence Film Festival, among other notations, and her novel manuscript of the same title was longlisted for the 2023 and 2025 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.  Her screenplay, STATS (adapted from her published short story of the same title), was a Finalist for the 2025 Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, a Finalist for the 2024 Harlem International Film Festival and advanced into the Second Round of the 2024 Austin Film Festival, among other notations.