Louise K. Waakaa’igan is an enrolled member at Odaawaa-Zaaga’iganiing in northern Wisconsin. Her first chapbook, This Is Where, Aquarius Press, was published in 2020. She is also the first-place winner of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop’s Broadside Competition (2016). Louise’s work has been previously published in PEN America, 21 Mythologies, The Moon Magazine, Night Colors, 27th Letter, Words in Gray Scale, and Doors Adjacent. She is ready to publish her second collection and recently has moved back to her beloved Minneapolis.

Fong Lee is a Saint-Paul-based artist and We Are All Criminal’s first Storytelling Fellow. Fong spent nearly 18 years inside Minnesota state prisons; he is a celebrated poet, with publications through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and Asian American Writers Workshop, a beloved painter, and a published photographer. Fong and his family immigrated to the U.S. as Hmong refugees when Fong was a child, after his family was displaced from their home in Laos.

Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the cofounder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt and is the producer of film projects including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution (Hulu), which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Sharkey was awarded the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.