Canon, Canyon, Cannon: Futurity

Black, poet, queer-god, hip-hop feminist, womanist: Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who now resides in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Olayiwola is Brown University's 2019 Heimark Artist -In -Residence and a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. The author of i shimmer sometimes, too published by Button Poetry and Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the City of Boston. Her work can be found published with TriQuarterly Magazine, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, The Academy of American Poets, Wildness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and elsewhere. Olayiwola joined the faculty of Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-In-Residence in Fall of 2022.

George Abraham (they/he/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, performance artist, and writer from Jacksonville, FL. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and the Big Other Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. He is also the author of the chapbooks al youm (The Atlas Review, 2017), and the specimen's apology (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). He is a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, The Arab American National Museum, The Boston Foundation, the National Performance Network, and the MAP Fund, and more. Their writing has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Guernica, The Baffler, The Paris Review, Mizna, and many other journals and anthologies. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University, Abraham has taught at Emerson College, and is currently based in Chicago, IL, where he is a Litowitz MFA+MA  student in Poetry at Northwestern University. He is currently Executive Editor of the Whiting Award winning journal Mizna. Their collaborations include co-editing a Palestinian poetry anthology with Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2025), and a performance art project titled EVE with Fargo Tbakhi. Follow on Instagram: @intifadabatata. 

Princess Moon (she/her/hers) is a second generation Cambodian-American award-winning poet and multidisciplinary artist based in Boston, MA. Her storytelling work unearths conversations with ancestral spirits, trauma left behind by the ghosts of violent men, and the hauntingly beautiful journey of finding one’s self. As the daughter of refugees, her work as an artist is heavily informed by the Cambodian Civil War and America’s involvement leading up to the genocide.  She was the first woman SlamMaster to the Mill City Slam and formerly served as the Programs Director of the youth organization FreeVerse! Princess Moon has graced the Finals stages of the 2011 Brave New Voices as well as the 2012 and 2013 Louder Than a Bomb Massachusetts. In 2014, she coached the winning team of LTABMA and was awarded the Charmaine Santiago Galdon Award for her tireless community building. Princess Moon has featured at the Boston Poetry Slam amongst other local and national venues and presented the Keynote Speech at the 2016 Massachusetts Mental Health Forum.  She is published in Out of the Shadows of Angkor, Merrimack Valley Magazine, Gateways Mag, Swift Collective’s Stop Asian Hate campaign, and in her first debut collection of poetry The Genocide’s Love Baby Learns to Sing (Bootstrap Press). Currently, she is represented by Jill Grinberg Literary Management in New York City and is writing her second book. For more information, check out byprincessmoon.com.  Follow on Instagram: @softestglow.  

Krysten Hill (She, her, hers) is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received a Jean Pedrick Prize in 2017. Her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Poetry Magazine, PANK, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review, and elsewhere. She received a Vermont Studio Center Residency in 2023, a Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship in 2020, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in 2016. Krysten is an educator and writer who has featured at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Boston Book Festival, Blacksmith House, New Hampshire Poetry Festival, and elsewhere. 

Tarik Bartel (they/them) is a community organizer and arts educator whose work is rooted in creating spaces for collective joy and imagination through spoken word, photography, and visual storytelling. Tarik has worked as a teaching artist and youth worker in the Greater Boston area since 2014. Tarik cofounded Boston-based art collective ANGRY ASIAN GIRLS in 2016. This collaborative project introduced them to radical liberation practices within youth-centered community work, and planted the seeds for all to come. Tarik has since designed and facilitated teen programming and poetry workshops with ICA Boston, Community Art Center, Boston Public Schools, and Roxbury Youth Programs. Tarik has been a featured poet at open mics across Massachusetts such as East Meets Words, Bummer City Open Mic, Lowell Untitled Open Mic, Lizard Lounge, and Emerson College. They published a chapbook titled how they love in 2019. Tarik currently works as the Liberation Leadership Coordinator at One Square World, a racial and climate justice organization that builds with communities historically targeted by systemic oppression to transform structures of power. Follow on Instagram: @tarikbartel. 

DJ WhySham aka Your Community DJ is a four-time nominated DJ/Producer, Visionary, Activist, Traveler, Sister, God-parent and Dorchester Native. WhySham is the CEO of “Boston Got Next Entertainment and Bringing Back Boston (BBBMA) now known as “The Social Justice Trap Movement, Inc.' She believes in bringing music, hardship and pain together while creating events as a release for collective trauma. WhySham is an On-air Radio Personality for SparkFM Online (Lunch Is Ova) on Thursdays at 1PM ET.  Follow on Instagram: @whysham617.