Our Team

Yasmine Badaoui is a poet, mother and fiction writer based out of Dearborn, Michigan. Her work has appeared in PrettyCoolPoetryThings, the RedFez, Cliterature and others. Her work centrals around the Lebanese diaspora, womanhood, and the trials and tribulations of being a Muslim with Appalachian heritage and surprisingly not her Bachelors of Science in Psychology from Iowa State. As a member of the Room Project in Detroit, Yasmine believes that cultivating safe spaces for expression is vital for the growth of artists at any age. When she isn’t foam-sword fighting with her boys or reading books you can find her reading poetry around the city.

Megan Catana (formerly Schikora) is a Detroit native with a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan and a M.A. in English from Wayne State University. She has been teaching English at the college level since 2007 and is a co-founder of Fortify, a Detroit-based writers’ retreat.  Her fiction and personal essays can be found in The Crooked Steeple, BlazeVOX, Foliate Oak, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, and The Literary Review.

Bayan Founas is an educator and artist currently studying at the University of Michigan to receive a Master’s degree in Educational Leadership and Policy. She founded and directs a high-school poetry club at Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, where she taught for two years, to give Detroit youth a safe space to creatively heal and be themselves fully without conforming to institutional norms. In August 2018, she published her first book, Diary of a Daughter in Diaspora – a collection of her poems giving readers the narrative of a first-generation Algerian and Muslim woman growing up in a post 9/11-Trump America.

Detroit Music Award winning singer/songwriter Audra Kubat has released 6 albums to critical acclaim in a career that spans over 20 years. A composer, performer, educator, and Wayne State University alumni, Kubat’s work has earned her a place in the community as a resource for empowerment through songwriting and music. Her methods of composition articulate grace and uncover hidden places that defy easy categorization. Kubat has created programming for a number of educational projects, including songwriting workshops for DPS, storytelling circles for Square One Education Network, and performance and lyric workshops with Girls Rock Detroit. Currently she is teaching with InsideOut Literary Arts, Living Arts Detroit, Wolf Trap, and the Detroit Institute for Music Education.

John Rybicki was born and raised in Detroit. He is the author of the poetry collections, We Bed Down Into Water, When All the World is Old, Traveling at High Speeds, and When All the World is Old. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Ecotone, and the Paris Review, among many others, and have been reprinted in Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He teaches poetry writing in various Detroit high schools through InsideOut Literary Arts; he also works with ‘Wings of Hope’ Hospice teaching poetry to children who have been through a trauma or loss. Holy work. His children have been published in Time Magazine for Kids, Skipping Stones, the North American Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and others. (photo credit:  Savannah Dooley)

Megan Stockton is a poet and publisher living in Detroit, Michigan. She is the current editor-in-chief of BathHouse Journal, a member of Problem Press, and editor at Weekday Journal. Her writing has been published by Publication Studio, Monster House Press, BigBig Wednesday, Bearings: Works About Boundaries, Flint Magazine, and A Plume Journal. She recently graduated with an M.A. in Creative Writing from EMU, and currently facilitates a poetry workshop at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility.

Benjamin Earl Turner is a writer, performer, and educator from the suburbs of Oakland, California. After graduating from Wiley College with two National titles in college competitive Forensics (Speech and Debate) Benjamin went on to attend Wayne State University and received a Masters degree in English, with a focus in Creative Writing and African Diasporic Literature. He was the editor of the Wayne Literary Review in 2018 and is currently a Composition and Rhetoric Instructor at Wayne State. His creative mediums of choice include poetry, creative non-fiction, songwriting, flash fiction, and screenwriting. He also has a fire SoundCloud.