Joe Davis
Joe Davis is a nationally-touring artist, educator, and speaker based in Minneapolis, MN. He employs poetry, music, theater, and dance to shape culture.
His work has been featured on BET, CNN, and VH1. He is the Founder and Director of multimedia production company, The New Renaissance, the frontman of emerging soul funk band, The Poetic Diaspora, and co-creator of JUSTmove, racial justice education through art. He has keynoted, facilitated conversation, and served as teaching artist at hundreds of high schools and universities including programs in New York, Boston, and most recently as the Artist-in-Residence at Luther Seminary where he earned a Masters in Theology of the Arts. To book, learn more, or connect, visit JoeDavisPoetry.com.
Paula Cisewski
Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, Quitter, won the Diode Editions Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and included in the recent or forthcoming anthologies Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, 78: A Tarot Anthology, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, and New Poetry from the Midwest. She teaches writing privately and academically, makes things, and collaborates with fellow artists and activists.
Katie Vagnino
A poet, educator, and writer originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Katie graduated from Yale University and earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Emerson College. Her debut collection of poetry, Imitation Crab (Finishing Line Press, 2021), explores the tension between authenticity and artificiality, and the slipperiness of identity through the lens of female experience.
Katie has taught creative writing, composition, research writing, and rhetoric at Emerson College, Roosevelt University, and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She has also led poetry workshops at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, the Newberry Library, the Loft Literary Center, and ArtStart’s School of the Arts Legacy Program. Currently, she teaches a monthly poetry class—Masters of Poetry—hosted by Gris Literatura.
As a freelancer, Katie’s work has been published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Verge, and Time Out New York/Boston/Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in more than a dozen literary journals including Measure, Unsplendid, The Raintown Review, and Poetry City, USA. In 2017, her poem “How to Explain Death to Your Daughter” was featured on Metro Transit buses and trains in the Twin Cities.
When she’s not writing or teaching, Katie can often be found performing with her band, The Flaming Doublewides, and serving on the Board of the Saint Paul Almanac. She is also the co-founder of Post-It Poetics (#postitpoetics), whose mission is to cover the world in poetry, one post-it at a time.
Tony Plocido
Tony Plocido started writing poetry in high school. However, he didn't get serious about until about 2009 when he got invited to "The Poetry Filibuster" in Kansas City, MO. This was 5 day, 18 hour long reading. The poets he met there encouraged him to move to Kansas City, MO. This turned his hobby into a passion. He has since published three books and there a 4th will be released August 2021. The first, Sucker Punch Wisdom, was published by Write the Future. This was done with two other K.C. poets (Jeremy O'Neal & William Peck). His other books include “Aging and Other Side Projects” in 2016, “Fell This so Many Times” in 2018 and is latest book “The Conflict that Creates” was released on Luchador Press in August 2021. In February 2019, he became a Cracked Walnut Board Member.
Tony now lives back in the Twin Cities and tries to perform whenever possible. He facilitates a workshop to help poets become better performers of poetry. He is also the current Curator / Host of Poets & Pints.
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