Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin
Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin (they/them) is a queer and trans, biracial, Vietnamese unamerican diaspora writer whose work revolves around themes of dreaming, fantasizing, and futurizing, and focuses on topics of diaspora, transness, ecology, empire, and intergenerational histories.
The Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Xenolithic Edges Literary, Kyla-Yến’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions, and appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, ANMLY, fifth wheel press, DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, and other publications.
They are a 2026 BIPOC Fellow for Trans Poetics Archive, a Press Editor for Half Mystic Press, and a Co-Coordinator for Sundress Publications’ Poets in Pajamas reading series, and have taught writing workshops independently as well as for Split This Rock and Table Conversation. They have also been awarded residencies, workshops, and/or fellowships from Tin House, the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), Seventh Wave, Abode Press, and more. You can visit Kyla-Yến's author page at www.kylayenhuynhgiffin.com, and find them on Instagram @yenshrine.
Michelle Lin (they/she) is a textiles and mixed media artist, community builder, and author of the poetry collection A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). Their cultural work and art practice are rituals of grief and healing from the violence of patriarchy, capitalism, assimilation, and living within the imperial core. Passionate about co-building liberatory spaces with diasporic and queer artists, they work as the Artist Growth Program Director at ARTogether and serve on the Advisory Councils for Vital Arts and Artists’ Adaptability Circles. They live on Ohlone land (San Francisco Bay Area). Connect with them at michellelinmakes.com and on IG @firstborncryptid.
Photo Cred: Claire Burke
Michelle Lin
Niki Wantanabe Robins
Niki Watanabe Robins (she/her) is chef and founder of Watanabe Kitchen, a Denver (Cheyenne, Ute, Arapaho land) & Los Angeles (Tongva land)-based business offering postpartum meals and intimate catering rooted in Japanese cuisine. After six years of running a marketing agency, Niki shifted focus to WK in an effort to greater support community healing and connection. What began as a way to nourish community in their most tender seasons—new parents, busy families, sick friends—became a practice of finding liberation and mindfulness in the kitchen.
Food nourishes beyond the body. This core tenet underpins Niki’s alchemy in the kitchen, and she’s dedicated to studying how food plays a role in storytelling, cultural preservation, and community care. Her current focus is deepening her knowledge of traditional Japanese postpartum cuisine—researching, recipe testing, and learning from chefs and birthing parents across cultures. Visit her website watanabekitchen.com or find her on instagram @watanabe_kitchen 🍊(Photo by Ross Everton)
Grace Brown (they/them), a tree on the outskirts, with many branches and deep roots, considers home wherever their feet are. As an Earth listener, poet, and storyweaver, their writing centers origin and root stories. Combining poetic reflection, personal narrative, meditation, and prayer to reflect on the wisdom and weave the tenderness of grief, ancestry, land, and voice. Connecting our human existence and the places and people we call home with our earthly ancestors. Using voice as a bridge between the living and the dead. They explore the cycles of birth and death and self and belonging through embodiment of the land and body as wisdom holders.
As a space holder, Grace centers themes of grief and the stories held in our bones.
Grace’s journey can be followed on their online publication Anatomy of a Tree. To connect further visit their website gracebrown.xyz or on instagram @igoby_grace.
Grace Brown
Taylor Shantz
Taylor Shantz (she / her) is a ceramicist, designer, and poet from northern California. Her background in sustainability and industrial design informs how she thinks about interaction, impact, and the importance of craft.
Her practice lies at the intersection of fluidity and connection across mediums, disciplines, and communities. She creates work that speaks to the natural relationships exclusive to its region—its ecology, folklore, and materials. She aims to surface both what is alive and what is lost. Using foraged materials like wild plants and clay to weave, entangle, and document ephemeral moments of the landscape.
She engages with place not only as a material resource but as a collaborator—listening to what it offers and reveals. Rooted in reciprocity, participation, and transformation. By weaving together practices of social engagement, alternative craft, and play. She seeks to create spaces of mutual recognition—where one can reinhabit senses, reimagine relationships to land, and connect through creation.
She works for an independent furniture design / art collective in Oakland and resides in San Francisco. She can be found at www.taylorshantzstudio.com or on instagram @taylor_is_at_home.
Janie Lan Mendosa
Janie Lan Mendosa (she/they) is an artist and art educator based on Wiyot land in Humboldt County, California.
All of her work is based on observation, intuition, and play, and straddles the threshold between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Her expressive paintings, photography, and ceramics meditate on the complexities of the human experience-how our inner worlds collide with outer environment. As a transracial Chinese-American adoptee, they use self portraiture as a mirror to see their lived experience, features, and identity reflected back in a way they never could before. Their ceramics and installations explore touch and interaction using tactile organic forms. Their work has been shown at Studio Montclair, Brenda Tuxford Gallery, Outer Roominations, Redwood Arts Association and more.
Janie is interested in providing accessible art and community spaces. They coordinated the nonprofit Playhouse Arts’ Wonder Wagon, a free mobile arts service for rural communities, and worked with Trash Mash-Up at SFMOMA’s Free Community Day: Ruth Asawa. She is looking forward to her time at the MAC Greenhouse Residency; and hopes to learn from and connect with the Mendocino community and her fellow residents through art making.
Chanelle Gallagher
Chanelle Gallagher (Anishinaabe, she/they) is a Minneapolis-based artist whose practice centers continual movement through time, memory, and material. Working primarily with clay, she builds forms that hold overlapping temporalities of ancestral memory, embodied present, and speculative futures where time is layered, moving, and returned to. She sees making as an ongoing act of world-building through dreaming and disruption. Through this practice, they reimagine ways of relating to material, to place, and to themself. Working with clay becomes an act of connection and resistance, deepening relationships with body and land while responding to the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism. They are continually drawn to water, shorelines, and fire as sites of transformation.
Chanelle is currently pursuing her MFA at the Institute of American Indian Artsin Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a former First People’s Fellow and was a Native American Artist-in-Residence at the Minnesota Historical Society. Find her on instagram @waabigan_clay (photo by Carla Rodriguez of BLKK HAND)