Carrie Rudzinski is a full time performance poet and filmmaker who has since performed her work for audiences across the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and India.

Ranked 4th in the world at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam and 7th in the world at the 2013 Individual World Poetry Slam, Carrie has represented Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles over the course of 11 national poetry competitions. Among her many Top 20 finishes, she took 2nd place at the coveted Underground Individual Competition at the 2011 National Poetry Slam, 2nd place at the 2014 Long Beach Poetry Slam Invitational, and 2nd place at the 2014 Belle�s Bakery Lounge Poetry Slam Invitational.

Carrie has facilitated workshops throughout the world and accepted a Part-time faculty position teaching Poetry and Performance at California State University Northridge during the Spring 2014 semester.

A featured performer at India�s Poetry with Praktiki Festival and New Zealand�s Auckland Readers and Writers Festival, she has performed alongside such renowned artists as Anis Mojgani, Rachel Mckibbens, Gypsee Yo, and Ken Arkind. Her work has been published in University of California Press Vol. 3, The Legendary, Catalyst, Muzzle, OnMag, Alight, and two Write Bloody Press anthology collections. Bicycle Comics published her first collection of poetry, A History Of Silence, in 2010. Her newest collection of work, The Blood Mouth, was released in 2014.

Hiwot Adilow was born and raised in a corner of Philadelphia that smells of berbere and blunts. This is to say Hiwot is a writer and the Philly-born daughter of Ethiopian immigrants. As an alum of the Philly Youth Poetry Movement, she has both competed on and co-coached the PYPM Brave New Voices youth slam team. She is currently pursuing a BA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a First Wave Hip-Hop and Urban Arts Scholar. She is also poetry editor of The Madison Review. Her poems have been featured on CNN�s Black In America, NPR�s Tell Me More, Wisconsin Public Television, and more.

Darline Morales is a photographer, poet, radio DJ, videographer and researcher currently attending University of Wisconsin-Madison. As an multimedia artist, her work centers on using the intersectionality between gender, race, class and sexuality to analyze the human condition, with a hip hop analysis. Darline is interested in using hip hop culture as a tool for communication, analysis and creative documentation.

As a photographer, she has participated in galleries within her time at UW-Madison. In 2012, she was part of the FausHaus collective, which presented a performance at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and gallery presentation at Chazen Art Museum. She has also premiered works at Audre Lorde Coop and the Multicultural Student Center's "Race and Place". Darline has extensive experience in digital photography, as well as film photography, using both 35mm and 120mm. She has worked in gelatin silver printing and cyanotype prints.

Through WSUM, Darline has a weekly radio show called "RhymeBasket", which plays hip hop and R&B. RhymeBasket's aim is to prioritize women-identified and LGBT voices in hip hop.

Yolanda Pruitt is a poet and visual artist from Phoenix, Arizona. She attends UW-Madison as part of the First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Scholarship Program studying African-American Studies with a focus in Black Women's Studies and Literature. She is dedicated to empowering youth through the arts and is a workshop facilitator for the One Life Workshop Series through John Vietnam Program, a nonprofit organization that offers poetry workshops to high school students in the Madison school district as well as at Dane County Juvinile Detention Center. She has one published work, Black November, a book of poems published through UW-Madison's Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives. Her work is centered around her own experiences and targets young girls and women of color who desperately need representation in the literary world. She hopes to go on to get her MFA in creative writing after undergrad.

Misian Taylor comes to writing as an attempt to bring the body and mind closer together. With poetry and prose she navigates gender, mental illness, queerness, childhood, white privilege, and social activism through an intersectional feminist lens. She has participated in the National Poetry Slam and has opened for Lauren Zuniga and Andrea Gibson. She will be attending John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the fall to pursue Criminology of Police Crime and Poetry.