Becky Thompson is a writer, teacher, scholar, and activist. Her books include When the Center is on Fire, A Promise and a Way of Life, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep, and Mothering without a Compass. Her most recent co-edited volume is Fingernails across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora. Becky has been awarded Rockefeller, Ford, NEH, and AAUW fellowships; the Gustavus Myers Award for Outstanding Books on Human Rights; and the 2011 Creative Justice Press Winter Chapbook Prize.
Melanie Henderson was born, raised and lives in Washington, DC. She is an alumna of Howard and Trinity Universities. Prior to earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, she studied poetry at the Voices Summer Writing Workshops (VONA) in San Francisco, CA. Her debut collection of poems,
Elegies for New York Avenue, won the 2011 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poems have appeared in
Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Drumvoices Revue, jubilat, Reverie, Torch, Tuesday: An Art Project, and
The Washington Informer. She participated in Huong's Peace Mural Exhibition in Washington, DC (2008-2009), was selected as a featured reader for the 2009 Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series, and is a recipient of the 2009 Larry Neal Writers Award (DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities). She is the Managing Editor of
Tidal Basin Review and the mother of a charming little boy.
