Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published over twenty books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). He has exhibited his paintings in solo shows at White Columns, 356 Mission, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum, as well as in many group shows, including at Essex Flowers, Wege Center for the Arts, Gordon Robichaux, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Yossi Milo Gallery, FIERMAN, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was released by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017; he has given musical performances of improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, The Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, the Renaissance Society, the Hammer Museum, and The Poetry Project. His first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired his literary archive. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Victor A. Saint-Hilaire is a multidisciplinary artist residing in Yonkers, New York who specializes mainly in digital illustration, acrylic painting and murals. He graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology with a BFA in Illustration in 2013 and has been working with Groundswell as a Lead Artist Muralist since 2015 as well as a Freelance Artist. His artwork often revolves around spirituality and other abstract concepts depicted via storytelling inspired by religions, folklore, mythology and historical figures from different cultures. Victor utilizes a style that emulates simplicity and innocence while tackling subjects that delve deeper into the human psyche and the nature of our reality.

Mercy is a Brooklyn-based Black trans visual artist, model, and advocate who isn’t here to be your teachable moment. Mercy’s work focuses on the beauty of fat, femme body performance as liberation. 
Mercy is passionate about expanding narratives and understandings of what it means to be trans, moving towards re-idealizing the notion of what it means to have a body. Mercy is interested in the ways we map desire, paying particular attention to how hue, color, size, and shape form our deepest longings. 

Luka Carter (b. 1990, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist who lived on a boat for three years in Rockaway Beach, NY, a trailer in Bolinas, CA and plenty of places in between. The friends and community that he finds in each of these places has allowed for a strong, beautiful network of friendship and artistic collaboration, similar to what futurists might call tentacularity – “about life lived along lines, not at points, not in spheres.” With a background in construction and cooking, Luka has a knack for making space for art in overlooked or interstitial spaces–– including an outhouse, abandoned lot, and a van. His practice spans zines, furniture, tattoos, ceramics, clothing, and installations. He recieved a BA from Colorado College and an MFA from the University of Georgia and has been an artist in residence at Eureka!, Chautauqua School of Art, ACRE, and Anderson Ranch. Recent exhibitions include Baba Yaga Gallery (Hudson, NY) SCOPE Art Fair (Miami), Baltimore Print Fair, and Manitou Art Center. He is currently a visiting professor at Colorado College

Keioui Keijaun Thomas is a New York-based artist. She creates live performance and multimedia installations that address blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, slipping between various modes of address, to explore the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. By centering self and communal care in real-time, Thomas’ practice aims to build bridges of understanding and community.

Gentle Mothh is a fiber artist, music producer, writer, and performer based in New York. They frequently dissolve to see who appears next. They create from remnants, building around them and through them, layering in precious objects and sonic inventions.
They write poetry, songs, and essays, and make objects to be touched. The best place to find them is inside their bi-weekly Substack newsletter called “Gentle, gentle.”