Dr. Nishi Chawla is an academic, a writer and a filmmaker. Nishi Chawla has published ten plays, three novels, and eight collections of poetry. She has also written and directed four award winning art house feature films. She has also co-edited two global anthologies of poetry published by Penguin Random House: ‘Greening the Earth’ and ‘Singing in the Dark.’
Dr Nishi Chawla holds a doctorate in English from the George Washington University, Washington D.C., and her post-doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. After teaching for nearly twenty years as a tenured Professor of English at Delhi University, India, Nishi Chawla had migrated with her family to a suburb of Washington D.C. She has taught English Literature for forty years at the University level.
She is one of the few Indian playwrights to have two plays in Manhattan, NY. She is the third Indian poet ever to be invited for a reading and a discussion of the US Library of Congress organized, ‘The Poet and the Poem’ program.
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, was published by Blair Publishing in Spring 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor, and co-director of the Klein Family Center of Communications Design.
Patti Ross is a poet whose work bridges social justice and the natural world. A graduate of The Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., and American University, she also holds a master’s degree in Management from DeVry University and a certificate in Social Justice Writing from the University of California, Berkeley. Patti’s poetry is known for its emotional depth and historical insight, delivering complex social themes in accessible language. Through performance and the written word, she challenges audiences to reflect on societal norms and the human condition.