Jekeva does a lot of things! She is the Editor-in Chief of Word Lit Zine, a lit quarterly for local readers and writers (which inspired Z-Sides), Managing Director of Lit Crawl Seattle, Director of Bibliophilia Storytelling Festival, and artistic director and performer of various equity and storytelling projects. As if that isn’t enough Jekeva is the author of the chapbook Les Amants: Lovers and other Strangers, the owner of Paradise Lost Publishing and Events, AND hard at work at her first novel. If Jekeva looks familiar to you, that’s because you may have seen her doing improv comedy with CSz Seattle — Home of ComedySportz; flying though space with the improvised Star Trek group, Where No Man Has Gone Before; or doing aerial fabric at the School of Acrobatics and new Circus Arts.

Claudia Castro Luna is Washington State Poet Laureate. She served as Seattle’s Civic Poet, from 2015-2017 and is the author of the Pushcart-nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) and This City, (Floating Bridge Press) and the creator of the acclaimed Seattle Poetic Grid. She is also a Hedgebrook and VONA alumna, a 2014 Jack Straw fellow, the recipient of a King County 4Culture grant and an individual artist grant from Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. She has an MA in Urban Planning, a teaching certificate and an MFA in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, La Bloga, Dialogo and Psychological Perspectives among others. Her non-fiction work can be read in several anthologies, among them This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home, (Seal Press) Claudia is currently working on a memoir, Like Water to Drink, about her experience escaping the civil war in El Salvador. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children. Since 2009, Claudia maintains Cipota bajo la Luna, a blog with reflections, writing and reviews.