I am a self taught black, trans author/ illustrator. My work in children's stories is about getting back what I lost in my youth. Writing to celebrate parts I was trained to hide, I believe any child, including our inner children, benefits from knowing we are enough. WeSayNay!A is my storytelling platform- where together WeSayNay! to anyone or anything that would make us small. When we're together, you're in the right place to enjoy a story!

Leona Chen is the firstborn of parents raised under martial law in Taiwan, and the great-granddaughter of the aboriginal Ketagalan tribe's last standing chief. In 2017, Tinfish Press published her debut poetry collection, BOOK OF CORD. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of TaiwaneseAmerican.org.

Hannah is a former lawyer trying to write things that don't suck souls, obsessive ceramicist, and sci-fi enthusiast. Korean American raised in east Los Angeles (2nd gen gyopo).

Diana Fu is a playwright, essayist, and Pushcart-nominated poet.

Her work has been published in Spark: A Creative Anthology, Yemassee, and Sky Island Journal, and more. She has written, produced, and co-directed her original play about gentrification in Oakland, California’s Chinatown: Tears at the Margins, which was based on her oral history interviews of community members and leaders. She released her inaugural chapbook In All Spaces Liminal in February 2021.

She was a 2022 APAture showcase artist with Kearny Street Workshop, a 2020 Duet Fellow with the environmental theater group Superhero Clubhouse, and has received many notable scholarships for her writing, including the Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Poetry Fellowship for Writers of Color, the L. Feder enrichment grant, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship for her attendance at Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Diana is passionate about Asian American advocacy, environmental justice, and equitable access to arts education.

Sherry Yuan spent the first five years of her life in Suzhou, China and the next 18 in Vancouver, Canada. She currently lives in San Francisco with her fiance and small brown dog, where she writes code by day and fiction by night. She loves writing, reading, art, rock climbing, and trying Trader Joe’s cheeses. She has stories published in Infinite Worlds Magazine and Luna Station Quarterly. You can find her at sherryyuan.me.

Marisa Lin is a daughter of immigrants and Minnesota native. She is a 2023 Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center, with work in Poetry South, Santa Clara Review, Porter House Review, The Racket, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Dream Elevator, is forthcoming in 2024 by Kernpunkt Press. Marisa is pursuing a Master’s Degree of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

Janine Lim, a native of San Francisco, is a multi-disciplinary artist currently living in Los Angeles, California. Her photographic work was exhibited in Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture and group show Abstract Vision at Hardware Gallery in Los Angeles. Her experimental short documentary film, “Grandfather Clock” produced by Pacific News Service was featured in Berkeley-based Women of Color Film Festival, Festival of Filipino Arts And Culture, and APAture. She is a former Bindlestiff Studio player and performed in “Stories High.” She is a long-time student of the martial arts training Capoeira Angola with Angoleiros Los Angeles. Her writing has been published in Youth Outlook Magazine, The Bold Italic, Literature for Life, and The Prairie Schooner. In 2018, she co-produced the monthly reading series Drunken Masters for Writ Large Press and performed in contemporary dance piece “Solid as a Rock” as part of Redcat’s New Original Works Festival. In 2021, she was awarded a fellowship from the Periplus Collective, a mentorship program which aims to democratize writing and publishing by matching emerging BIPOC writers with established authors. She is currently focusing her creative efforts in fiction and creative non-fiction exploring themes of the Philippine diaspora, motherhood, generational trauma, and grief. She writes a monthly newsletter, "Say the Thing" on Substack, where she writes about the loss of her daughter.

Sabina Shanti Kariat is an animator, artist, and filmmaker based in San Francisco. She is a second generation child of immigrants from South India, and is inspired by representations of South Asians in art and film that have expanded possibilities for her identity. She has created animations for documentary films about the 1960's American civil rights movement, the history of Asian American internment in California, the impact of the criminal justice system on refugees, and loss of native languages among immigrants. Sabina has worked as a teaching artist throughout San Francisco with students from pre-k through high school, and has held co-creation workshops with Adivasi (indigenous) activists in rural India as a Brown University Social Innovation Fellow, and with Syrian-Turkish youth in Istanbul as a Fulbright Fellow. She is interested in illustration as a way to combat erasure, education as a way to explore unlearning, and diaspora as its own form of world-building, memory-preservation, and futurism. Her work has been published in spaces such as Visions Magazine and Senra Setting Magazine. Her films and animations have been screened at Southern Exposure Juried Exhibition , “Don’t Google It” Short Film Showcase, “Karagoz, Hacivat, and Me” Karam House Art Show, New York Istanbul Short Film Festival, LA Documentary Film Festival, Universal Kids Film Festival, Home is Distant Shores Festival, International Migration and Environment Film Festival, and “File/Life” interactive video installation at Temple University Institute on Disability.

Zareen Choudhury is a Bangladeshi American writer and cartoonist based in San Francisco, California. Her interests lie in using art, humor, and storytelling to uplift marginalized voices and create community through shared experiences. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Nib, McSweeney's, and more. Follow her at www.zareenchoudhury.com.

Tania (she/her) is the eldest daughter of a Zapotec-Mexican family which incidentally means she is a translator, a bootleg paralegal, and recovering unofficial therapist. She is from the southern border of AZ and is incredibly biased about what constitutes good Mexican food. In her work she strives to capture the complexity of joy,as well as the nuanced ways she has witnessed life unfold. Her work has appeared in JMWW, Exposition Review and is forthcoming in the 2022 Roots.Wounds. Words Anthology.

Victoria is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, originally from San Diego. When not reading or writing, she also volunteers with impacted Southeast Asian communities as a Vietnamese language interpreter and community advocate.

As an abolitionist with big theater kid energy, Audrey believes that the work of liberation asks us not just to dismantle systems of oppression, but to offer compelling, joyful, just, and tangible alternatives. They lean on play, improv, and time travel as exploratory spaces to imagine beyond our current realities and engage in collective dreaming. Audrey is the author of two poetry collections – first drafts, second chances and Six Months of Aprils (Este) – and the short play “Every Story is A Love Story.” They currently reside on unceded Tongva lands and share their home with two cats, Jean Grey, and Dr. Hank McCoy.

Alex Feliciano Mejía (he/they) works at the intersections of ethnography, pedagogy, and media art. He’s interested in themes of diaspora, memory, language, and labor among communities impacted by racial capitalism. Their media arts projects have been shared and supported at spaces such as Root Division, Southern Exposure, Gray Area, and Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Alex is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at San Francisco State University, where he also works as an Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, and Arts Education in the Graduate College of Education.

saahil sees themself as a writer and intercultural educator who has learned the importance of storytelling in the classroom, first as a student, later as a teacher. They tend to write about love, lust and longing—particularly where these notions intersect with the fine lines between optimism and pessimism, joy and melancholy, innocence and insight.

Nicola Andrews (Ngāti Paoa, Pākehā) currently lives on Ramaytush Ohlone territory. An alum of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Rooted & Written fellowships, in 2022 they were awarded second place in the Kohukohu Library Poetry Prize and Takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize. Their micro-chap Sentimental Value is forthcoming with Ghost City Press, and their debut

chapbook Māori Maid Difficult is forthcoming with Tram Editions. In their spare time, they watch dinosaur documentaries with their cat.

Website: bit.ly/NicolaAndrews

IG: @poi_division