Maria Hamilton Abegunde is a memory keeper, poet, ancestral priest, and full-spectrum doula. Her work focuses on the Middle Passage, genocide, sexual violence, and community healing. She uses contemplative practices and ritual to approach the Earth and human bodies as sites of memory, and with the understanding that memory never dies, is subversive, and can be recovered to heal traumas. Her writings have been published in the journals Obsidian, the Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, North Meridian Review, and Tupelo Quarterly; in the books SO WE CAN KNOW: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth; ASHE: Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic Expressivity; Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue; and Black Joy Unbound; and in the exhibitions Be/Coming and Sister Song: The Requiem, for which she is the commissioned poet. She is the creator of Stargazing: Re/Imagining the Life of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Breckenridge at the Wylie House Museum. Abegunde is a Cave Canem, Sacatar, and Black Earth Institute fellow. She is Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.

LaShawnda Crowe Storm is an artist, activist, community builder, and occasionally an urban farmer. Whether she is making artwork or sowing seeds, Crowe Storm uses her creative power as a vehicle for dialogue, social change and healing. At the core of Crowe Storm’s creative practice is a desire to create community-based processes where making art becomes the opportunity to create the necessary space and place for difficult conversations around a variety of topics including racial justice, historical violence, and gender empowerment with an eye toward community healing and transformation. Crowe Storm has an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received several awards including two Creative Renewals Awards, a DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award, and an Art Place America National Creative Placemaking Award.

Saleem Hue Penny (him/friend) is a Black, disabled poet expanding the pastoral tradition of the Southern Black Belt using a “rural hip-hop blues” aesthetic. Punctuating his hybrid work with construction scraps, drum loops, Jim Crow artifacts, and birch bark, Saleem explores how young people of color traverse wild spaces and define freedom on their own terms. Saleem’s art and advocacy are inseparable. He is a proud Cave Canem Fellow, 2024 Disability Futures Fellow, and a member of the O|Sessions Black Listening cohort. Saleem was an inaugural PeoplesHub Social Justice Artist-in-Residence and a 2021 Poetry Coalition Fellow. A board member at Ecosystems of Care, a parenting mentor at ConTextos, and a founding worker-owner of Cooperation Racine, L.W.C.A in Englewood, Chicago, Saleem’s work is rooted in Disability Justice. He is an assistant poetry editor at Bellevue Literary Review and has received support from Hurston/Wright Writers Week Worksop, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Saleem is developing TRKLDWN, an interactive poetics informed by 1980s means-testing, centered around the Application for Access to Entitlement Words. He is also pursuing archival research for The Happy Land Liniment Project, an oral history, digital field guide, and speculative lyric essays set in Reconstruction-era “Affrilachia.”

L. Renée is a poet, story collector, and nonfiction writer. Nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes, her work has been published in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Tin House Online, Poetry Northwest, minnesota review, Callaloo, American Life in Poetry, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She won the National Association of Black Storytellers’ 2023 Black Appalachian Storyteller Fellowship, representing the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the 2024 Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology at the Library of Congress. Her honors also include The Arkansas International 2023 Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize, the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, and Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Watering Hole, L. Renée is a 2024-2025 Poetry Coalition Fellow at Mass Poetry, awarded by the Academy of American Poets, and a 2024-2025 Public Humanities Fellow, awarded by Virginia Humanities.

Duriel E. Harris is the Editor of our favorite award-winning lit mag—Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora—celebrating our living legacies through 50 years of continuous publication and making way for 50 more years of Black lit, Black art, Black Excellence!