Poet and spoken-word artist Marty McConnell earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a seven-time National Poetry Slam Team member and the 2012 winner of the National Underground Poetry Individual Competition. Her collections of poetry include wine for a shotgun (2012), awarded a silver medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and when they say you can't go home again, what they mean is you were never there (2018), which won a Michael Waters Poetry Prize. McConnell is also author of the book Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Workshop (2018).