Matthew Burgess is an Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College. He is the author of a poetry collection, Slippers for Elsewhere (UpSet Press, 2014), and two children’s books, Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings (Enchanted Lion Books, 2015) and The Unbudgeable Curmudgeon (Knopf, 2019). He edited an anthology of visual art and writing titled Dream Closet: Meditations on Childhood Space (Secretary Press, 2016), as well as a new collection titled Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2019). A poet-in-residence in New York City public schools since 2001, he also serves as a contributing editor of Teachers & Writers Magazine. 

Susan Karwoska is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Fiction; a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace residency for emerging artists; and residencies at the Ucross Foundation and at Cummington Community of the Arts. From 2005-2014 she was the editor of Teachers & Writers Magazine and currently serves on its editorial board. She is also on the board of the New York Writers Coalition and has served on NYFA’s artist advisory board. She writes and edits for a variety of publications and organizations, works as a writer-in-the-schools, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is at work on a novel.

India Choquette (she/her) is an editor at Teachers & Writers Magazine. She teaches creative writing and composition at The City College of New York, where she was awarded the 2022 Teachers and Writers award for excellence in teaching. Her short fiction has been published by Hobart, Foglifter, 365Tomorrows, and elsewhere, and she has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and Art Farm. She has her MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York, where she won the Stark Short Fiction Prize.

Asari Beale is a writer, advocate for children’s literacy, and the Executive Director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Prior to joining Teachers & Writers, she served as a fundraising and communications professional at Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service and Reach Out and Read of Greater New York. In addition, she has taught literature and creative writing at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Fordham University.

Joshua Garcia (he/him) is a poet, writer, and the managing editor of Teachers & Writer’s Magazine. He is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press 2024), and his poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

Aybike Ahmedi is an Editorial Fellow at Teachers & Writers Magazine. She is an Uzbek, Turkish, American writer, teacher, and editor from New Jersey. She explores her Central Asian heritage through her oral history projects and writing. Aybike teaches composition and creative writing at The City College of New York, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing, and also works as an archival assistant, processing the materials of John Henrik Clarke. She is managing editor for Guernica Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Teachers & Writers Magazine, Whitman on Walls Anthology Vol. 2, the Cephalopress Anthology: Borders and Belonging, Archives as Muse, and Wrist Enthusiast.

Naomi Day is an interdisciplinary storyteller, teaching artist, and editor. Her writing examines the politics of the Black body, the construct of social monstrosity, and generational trauma as inheritance. She’s been published in Uncanny Magazine and Black Warrior Review, among others, and she currently holds editorial roles at Teachers & Writers Magazine and The Seventh Wave. She has an MFA from The New School, a background in software engineering, and a passion for storytelling across forms.