Besides abundant with Southern melanin, Jeané D. Ridges is a food-serenading, ecos-admiring poetic storyteller creating in the speculative expanse and sometimes this so-called reality while living with systemic lupus. They’re grateful for the space, together nurturing one another as well as our craft, offered by SISTORIES’s Luminary Editorial Incubator, Voodoonauts, Fellowship of the Griots, the Carbon Collective, Southern Esesu Endeavor, Roots. Wounds. Words., and who they affectionately claim as the Shenaniganders. They’ve also been a copyeditor at khōréō since 2023 and became a poetry coeditor at Anathema: Spec from the Margins in 2025, loving both for the rich feltness and possibility traversed in their pages.