Additional honors include being named Muse of African American Poetry for the City of Alameda and premiering It’s “She Works Hard for the Money” Friday which means closeted frat boys and triple tips.

Nimalah Baaith-Ducharme’s work has appeared at Poets.org (where she won the Harold Taylor Prize in 2019), Nighthawk Literature, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Of Rootwork, was a finalist in the 2025 Alta California Chapbook Contest, sponsored by Gunpowder Press and judged by Raina J. León. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, earned her MFA from Emerson College, and is currently a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University. Fried Chicken Prison the name of your Thanksgiving sentence, to be held consecutively for the duration of our lives serving legs, wings, and thighs butter and oils again making the underlying rhythm by which we conduct our year cooking with butter even after Paula Deen was deemed racist cause we been doin’ this— When am I gonna get my show? Who don’t use butter? sizzling underneath the conversation of fried chicken prison // we’re fat on the best food fat, like phat, like Baby Phat, like beautiful fat thighs, stomach and chunky behind like bragging about your empty plate fat as you move for seconds // During that time and every other time, I ate memories of white rice and fried egg— Girls with long hair fighting at the bus stop— Cocoa Puffs squirming with wings and legs— Oops babies and ghetto twins— Corned beef and spam— Now you cook with white wine and prosciutto and we think charcuterie is a meal and you resent breakfast for dinner because you can’t show us how far you’ve moved from your mother yelling at her boyfriend to stop calling dinner poor people food and now we’re fat on the best food waiting for you to ask what’s for dinner knowing you’re going to cook whatever you want anyway ### Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Elisha Mykelti conjures poetry that honors sight. She received the 2023 Emily Morrison Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review Elisha is pursuing an MFA in poetry at Virginia Tech, where she is working on her manuscript, “TWOHEAD

justified my needs with what other couples did, namely the ones who morphed into conjoined twins from Friday

You stayed late on the Friday and found her desk in the open plan office.

Return Home  (Counterpoint Press), a short story collection,  Kinds of Grace  (Flowersong Press), a poetry Her newest poetry collection VERSUS will be released by Texas Review Press in March 2027. received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (prose), Kimbilio (fiction), CantoMundo (poetry

Her work has been featured in Palette Poetry , Southeast Review , Muzzle Magazine , Rhino Poetry, and

Winner of the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry and The Florida Review 2024   Editors' Award in Poetry Track One (Kick, Push III) featuring Lupe Fiasco Any body, everybody watchin’ us here—two Black kids

Her recent poetry has been published in Foothill Poetry Journal’s Fall 2023 issue. She will appear in ALLIUM: A Journal of Poetry and Prose in Spring 2024.

She has work published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner , the Indiana Review, Frontier Poetry Ajanaé is the winner of the Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Editors Prize, a finalist for the Cave Canem Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, and a finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins poetry

Brittany is a fellow of  VONA, The Watering Hole, Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door Writing Retreat, as A contemporary poetry class with a professor who didn't quite understand what contemporary meant.

She writes poetry highlighting the intersection of Afro-Caribbean and American identity, and mental health She is currently the Assistant Poetry Editor for Gigantic Sequins and previously served as the Editorial She's a Tin House fellow for fiction writing, and her poetry has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, Paper filling her shopping cart with too many flowers, running 5Ks with her dog, Mya, or at work on her first poetry