Patrick Phillips’s first book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (Norton, 2016), was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. He is also the author of three poetry collections, including Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Phillips teaches writing and literature at Stanford University.

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press, 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017) as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (Bloof Books, 2019). She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA” through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. Her third collection, Waterbaby, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2021.

Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. A 2019 NEA fellow and recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he is the author of The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020). He lives in Austin, Texas.

James Allen Hall is the author of I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2017), a book of lyric personal essays selected by Chris Kraus for CSU’s Essay Collection Award. His first book of poems is Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas, 2008), which won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee conferences, he teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College, where he directs the Rose O’Neill Literary House.

Floyd Collins earned his MFA and PhD at the University of Arkansas. A book of critical essays on poetry, The Living Artifact, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin University Press in spring 2021. The Teresa Poems will appear from Somondoco Press in fall 2021. His poetry and critical prose appear regularly with The Arkansas Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Kenyon Review.

Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections: Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), and The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009). Her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book (Catapult, 2019), has appeared in many languages worldwide. In 2020, it was adapted for radio as the BBC’s Book of the Week and honored as a Georgia Book of the Year for Memoir. Christle is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University.

David Woo is the author of Divine Fire (Georgia Review Books/The University of Georgia Press, 2021) and The Eclipses (BOA Editions, 2005). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, The Asian American Literary Review, Literary Imagination, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Alain Mabanckou is considered one of Francophone Africa’s most prolific contemporary writers. A novelist, essayist, and poet, Mabanckou was born in what is now called Congo-Brazzaville, and his work has garnered a multitude of awards, including the prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature from the Académie Française. Twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, he lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at the University of California—Los Angeles. When he isn’t teaching, he divides his time between France and traveling the globe. This selection of translated poems comes from As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems, forthcoming from Seagull Books in fall 2021.