Patti Kameya writes, edits, forages wild plants, and treats historical amnesia in the Dakota homeland of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her writing appears in North Dakota Quarterly (2022), This Was 2020 by the Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project (2021), and elsewhere. She was a 2019–2020 Loft Mentor Series fellow and received several Minnesota State Arts Board grants to research and write about a Japanese American family who moved to Minneapolis in 1919. As a teaching artist, she taught “Your Story and Historical Context” at the Loft Literary Center in 2018, 2022, and 2025. Most recently she has turned her passion for discussing Minnesota history and identity toward developing comedy material for Funny Asian Women Kollective’s three-day tour of rural Minnesota. Find her work at pattikameya.com.

Sherrie Fernandez-Williams earned her MFA in Writing from Hamline University.  She is a 2021-2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2021 Black Voices in Children’s Literature winner. She received an Artist Initiative Award through the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship, a SASE/Jerome Grant, a Jones’ Commission Award through the Playwrights’ Center, a Givens Black Writers Collaborative Fellowship, and was a Loft Mentor Series Winner in Creative Nonfiction.  Author of Soft: A Memoir, Fernandez-Williams has published poems in journals including New Limestone Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review, and Duke University's minnesota review, among others. Her essays can be found in anthologies including, We are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, How Dare We Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse, and The Poverty and Education Reader. She co-curates the Queer Voices Reading Series with LM Brimmer in collaboration with Quatrefoil Library and Hennepin County Libraries in Minnesota.