Manuel Aragon (he/him) is a Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker from Denver, CO, with nearly 20 years of experience in nonprofit work, focusing on community engagement, project management, and film/TV production. He has worked at six nonprofit organizations, building community-led programs, inclusive spaces, and art experiences.

Manuel holds a BFA in Film/TV from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He is currently working on Norteñas, a speculative fiction short story collection centered in the Northside of Denver, a Mexican and Mexican-American community. His work has been featured in ANMLY, and his short story "A Violent Noise" was nominated for the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. He is a 2021 Periplus Collective Fellow, a 2021 NYFA IAP Mentor, a 2023 Tin House Residency winner, and a Colorado Book Award finalist as editor of the anthology All The Lives We Ever Lived: Vol 2.

Manuel's film work, including writing and directing, has been showcased on MTV, Pitchfork, and Stereogum. He won the CineLatino Pitch Latino Award for Emerging Filmmakers with his web series Welcome to the Northside, a comedic take on gentrification and Latino displacement in North Denver. He lives in Denver with his wife, Sarah, and their four children.

Mary Grace Bernard (MG, she/they/ugh) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, advocate, & crip witch. Her practice finds itself at the intersection of performance art, transmedia installation art, art scholarship, art writing, curation, & activism. Exploring seemingly separate fields like the material & immaterial realities of disability, the living dead, queerness, cyborgism, crip time, post-humanness, spirituality, madness, care, dependency, & the boundaries between the personal & political spheres of existence, they seek to dissolve binary thinking while converging otherwise invisible communities & their stories.

Sarah McKenzie (she/her) is a visual artist and one of the co-founders of Tilt West. She has exhibited her paintings nationally, including shows with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Yale School of Architecture, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Her work is represented in Denver by David B. Smith Gallery. Since 2020, Sarah has been working on an extended project researching and painting the architecture of prisons. In 2021, she was awarded the Marion International Fellowship for the Visual and Performing Arts to support her research into carceral space. That same year, she also began teaching art classes inside the Colorado Department of Corrections. In 2024, Sarah co-founded Impact Arts, a non-profit that creates and supports exhibition opportunities for formerly and currently incarcerated artists.

Ilan Gutin (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator originally from the Washington, D.C. area. He earned his BA in Studio Arts with a focus in Printmaking from the University of Maryland in 2008 and his MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. An avid world traveler, Gutin draws inspiration from his experiences abroad, which continue to inform a studio practice rooted in formalism, the ephemerality of light and place, and the wonder of looking.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in cities including Chicago, Reykjavík, and Denver. Before moving to Denver in 2020, he taught in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at SAIC and was the Founder and Co-Director of Fernwey Gallery in Chicago, an artist-run space dedicated to supporting emerging and mid-career artists.

Since relocating to Denver, Gutin has served as Gallery Curator and Membership & Program Director at Art Gym Denver, and later as Curator and Engagement Director at PlatteForum and Gallery Director at Visions West Contemporary. He is currently the Gallery Manager at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (RMCAD), Co-Director and Co-Curator of Friend of a Friend Gallery, an independent curator, and a board member of Tilt West.

Brice Maiurro (he/him) is a poet and storyteller living in Denver, Colorado. He is the Poetry Editor for Suspect Press and the Editor-In-Chief of South Broadway Ghost Society. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Hero Victim Villain and Stupid Flowers. You can find him at www.maiurro.co.

Assetou Xango (they/them) is a poet and community activist born and raised in Colorado. They have been writing since they were in 8th grade. As a teenager, Xango was featured on HBO’s Brave New Voices 2010. They are a two-time TEDxMileHigh Speaker. Xango has represented Denver in spoken word poetry competitions across the nation and has been featured as one of Westword’s Top 100 Creatives. Their work has been published in Glyph, Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s literary journal.

Xango is currently the Poet Laureate of Aurora, Colorado (2017–2021). They run their own coaching business, helping Black Femmes heal their unworthy stories and live the lives they desire. In all of their work, Xango is dedicated to advancing the visibility and rights of womxn and gender non-conforming people of color and to promoting the use of storytelling to dismantle binaries and divisions.

Bobby LeFebre (he/him) is an award-winning writer, performer, and cultural worker from Denver, Colorado. He is a two-time Grand Slam Champion, a National Poetry Slam Finalist, an Individual World Poetry Slam Finalist, and a two-time TEDx speaker. His work has been showcased nationally and internationally on NPR, the Huffington Post, and The Guardian, and the LA Times. LeFebre has performed at hundreds of cultural events, social actions, detention centers, conferences, and colleges and universities across the United States and abroad. He is co-founder of Café Cultura, a non-profit organization that uses poetry as a tool for youth development and he is also founder of #WeAreNorthDenver, a grassroots and digital campaign dedicated to using art as an entry point for discussing gentrification in Denver. LeFebre has been named a 100 Colorado creative by Westword Magazine, is a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures fellow, and has recently been appointed by the Mayor of Denver to serve as the Co-Chair of the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Metro State University and a master’s degree in Art, Literature, and Culture from the University of Denver.

Suzi Q. Smith (she/her) is an artist, activist, and educator who lives with her brilliant daughter in Denver, Colorado. She has shared her poetry on stages throughout the U.S., sharing stages with Nikki Giovanni, Talib Kweli, the late Gil Scott Heron, and many more over the years. Her work has appeared in Union Station Magazine, Suspect Press, Muzzle Magazine, Malpais Review, Peralta Press, and more, and her collection of poems, Thirteen Descansos, is available from Penmanship Books. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Poetry Slam, Inc.

Mark Addison (he/him) has been looking at, reading about and talking about contemporary art for over forty years. He taught the oxymoronic contemporary art history at CU Boulder for ten years. Works by over sixty Colorado artists have passed thru the Addison collection and many have gone on to museums.