Tess Taylor is the author of five celebrated poetry collections including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, and Rift Zone, and Work & Days. Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times, and more. She has taught widely, from UC Berkeley to Queen’s University in Belfast, and served as on air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She recently published her first full length poetry anthology: Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published in 2026.

Tess was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Poet Laureate Fellowship in 2024 and served as the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California, where she hosted literary events in schools and community centers.

Ciera Eis is a bicoastal director who develops socio-political new work and seeks to emphasize experiences that are queer, messy, visceral, otherworldly, weird, wild, and hilarious.

Recent directing credits include: Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange (Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, ColLABo at Carnegie Mellon University), Hadestown (American Conservatory Theatre YC), The Mushroom God of Leaf-Cutter Ants (The Tank NYC), Love U: A New Musical (Z Below/TBA Ca$h Grant), and She Kills Monsters (SF Community High School).

For five years Ciera was a producer on Berkeley Repertory's New Works Summer Program The Ground Floor. She is a founding member of the Bay Area Director's Collective, a Playground Company Member, and a 2024 Directors Lab West Recipient. She received her B.A. in Theater Arts and Psychology from UC Santa Cruz.

Sara Witsch is a genderqueer noisemaker, sound artist, production specialist, and lifelong learner who graduated with a BA in Theater Arts from San Francisco State University. Sara designs sound for theater, radio plays, immersive art, video games and so much more. They specialize in soundscapes and ambience. She is drawn to work that shares her commitment to thoughtful storytelling, art as a movement of revolution and resistance, and giving every voice an opportunity to be heard. They are Co-Artistic Director and Production Manager at SoundPlay Media, a sound collective exploring the world of sound specific performance art and theater-focused media. Check out Sound-Play’s podcast series at barewiretheater.com.

Ryan Yu is a media designer and theater-maker. Ryan is currently pursuing an MFA in Video & Media Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Ryan holds a BA in Classics (Greek literature) and Theater (Design), with a minor in Music Composition from Stanford University.

Ryan has worked across genres of performance making - from literary theatre, musicals, operas, to dance and installations. Recent works include Ajax at Carnegie Mellon University, In A Memory Palace with Theatre Nohgaku, and objects to destroy ourselves with at Nitery Experimental Theatre.

Ryan is interested in queer utopias, unintelligible noise, painting with no brush, and screaming with no mouth; in hopes of getting across.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: a Memoir; Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize; Dulce, winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize; and, most recently, he is the co-editor of the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora. He is the 2025 guest editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and has also curated the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day Series.

He was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and co-founded the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the U.S., and for which he was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers award.

He currently serves as faculty in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California and at Ashland University’s Low-Res MFA program.

Elizabeth Dell is a film and content producer, producing plays, films, TV pilots, webseries, commercials, etc, including Destination Wedding, starring Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves. She is currently leading microdrama business for Hoorae Media / Issa Rae and was recently as the Head of Production for CandyJarTV. Elizabeth is also the CEO and founder of the romance and games couples app Amorus and co-founder of music and intimacy product Groove Thing.

Peter Glazer is a playwright, director, author, and Emeritus Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. His book Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America was published in 2005. Other works include Heart of Spain: A Musical of the Spanish Civil War, O'Carolan's Farewell to Music, and Foe, his adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's novel, which had its world premiere at UC Berkeley. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), and for 30 years has helped write, direct, and produce commemorative events celebrating US anti-fascist volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.

Sally Stein, Prof. Emerita, UC Irvine, has most recently published a selection of her photography essays with MACK: Close-ups from Afar (2025). Now living in NYC, she continues researching photography — both black-and-white and color — and its discourse. Dr. Stein has long studied photographic topics in relation to broader questions of culture and society, publishing extensively on FSA and New Deal government photography, the contested image of FDR, and popular mass media (Ladies Home Journal, Life, Look). In 2020 she culminated decades of research on Dorothea Lange with a revisionist monograph on Lange's famed Migrant Mother. Her most recent publication, Gail Rebhan, About Time (MACK), accompanies the 2023 Rebhan retrospective she curated at AU's Katzen Galleries in DC. For more info: www.sallystein.com.