2025 Monterey Poetry Festival

Chris Carr is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary conceptual artist, photographer, emcee, educator and instrumentalist. In 2010, he founded Brooklyn Wildlife, a creative arts incubator specializing in independent art and music. He hosts podcasts and interview series and have organized hundreds of live events and performances. He’s spent twenty years playing music and have toured more than half the country. Along with Melissa Hunter Gurney, He co-founded the art space Gamba, the GAMBAZine publication, and Black Land Ownership. He leads Diversity and Inclusion workshops and developed Curating the Classroom to help schools deactivate systemic oppression.

Straight out of Shreveport, Louisiana, Miss Fortune is an artist with a deep love for R&B, storytelling, and performance. With a background in choir, performing arts, and writing, she developed a strong voice and stage presence, blending emotion with technique. A natural storyteller, she weaves her experiences into music, poetry, and writing, creating work that’s honest, soulful, and always evolving. Through her music, she aims to uplift women and survivors of abuse and assault, using her art as a source of strength and empowerment.

Heather Flescher is a disabled trans activist, poet and playwright. She has published three books and is working on another, tentatively titled “For the Duration”.

Pilar Graham is a poet and essayist. Her poetry has appeared in Sundog; Haunted Waters Press; Indent Literary Journal; Finishing Line Press; Blackberry; Voices—amongst other literary journals and anthologies. Publications for her creative nonfiction essays include Essay Daily; The Broiler: A Journal of New Literature; Poetry Midwest; and Pithead Chapel Press. Pilar has served as a literary editor and a judge for local and national writing competitions. Her debut collection of poems, Currents, was published December 2022. Her second collection of poems, Falling, was recently accepted for publication, and is scheduled to be released summer 2024. Pilar teaches at CSU Monterey Bay. She also teaches part-time for Fresno City College as an online instructor. Pilar divides her time between Monterey and the wilderness outside of the southern entrance to Yosemite.

Alex Luceli Jiménez (she/her) is a queer Mexican writer and school counselor in training based in Marina, CA. Her writing has appeared in Barren Magazine, Berkeley Fiction Review, Lunch Ticket, Southwest Review, Moonflowers and Nightshade: An Anthology of Sapphic Horror, Scissor Sisters: An Anthology of Sapphic Villains, and others. She is the author of the poetry collection THIS RAMBLING HEART and is currently revising a queer young adult horror novel in the tradition of CARRIE as part of WriteHive’s mentorship program. Learn more about her work at alexlucelijimenez.com.

Aideed Medina, poet and spoken word artist, creates and performs poetry in English, or Spanish, as dictated by the inspiration of each individual piece. She enjoys mentoring high school students under the direction of the Fresno Poet Laureate, Bryan Medina, with the Poetry Out Loud Program, and for youth slam competitions throughout the central valley. She was honored to be the 2017 Representative for the Loud Mouth Poetry Slam of Visalia, CA at the Women of the World Poetry Slam DTX, and recently received the 2017 Fresno Arts Council Horizon Award for her contributions to the city’s artistic and cultural scene in the category of individual artist. She is currently working on her first two manuscripts, “A California Dime” and “Mis Papelitos”.

Morrison is a Bay Area poet who splits her time between San Francisco and a place she calls MermaidTown, in Southern California. When she’s not cauldroning poems, Morrison lives by the Law of Three, summoning sea warriors for the feminine take back, and guiding the land dwellers back home to themselves through tarot, natal charts, and good old fashioned spell casting. 

Brian Sheffield is a performance poet based out of the central coast in California. He is co-founder of Mad Gleam Press, a French-American small press. He is also co-editor of POST(blank) and an editor with the Boukra Collective. He has performed and been published internationally, among predominantly independent circles.

Through the content of his work, award winning Los Angeles based Poet, Music Producer and Activist, Christopher Siders, encourages his audience members to think critically about social norms and how we subconsciously affect one another through our everyday behaviors. Within his own experiences as an activist, he is able to share his successes and failures, and guide future activists at any institution, to make positive decisions for the community to flourish and teach students to become a better ally for movements or areas of interest. Siders graduated from California State University Monterey Bay with a B.A. in Human Communications with a concentration in Creative Writing and Social Action.