Matthew Nienow is the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016). His poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and many other magazines and anthologies. A former Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow, he has also received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a builder of wooden boats and other watercraft.

Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, the New York Times, and other publications, and in several anthologies, including Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. Smith has been the recipient of an Orlando Prize, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship. Her chapbook, Scatter, Feed, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2014, and her book, Nobody’s Jackknife, was published in 2015 by the West End Press.

Jose Hernandez Diaz, a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow, is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, Poetry, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Currently, he is a guest editor for Frontier and Palette Poetry.

Leah Poole Osowski’s Hover Over Her (Kent State University Press, 2016) won the 2015 Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Black Warrior Review, Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She was a former Emerging Writer in Residence at Penn State Altoona and is the poetry editor of Raleigh Review. 

Molly Brodak published a full-length collection of poetry, A Little Middle of the Night (University of Iowa Press, 2010); a memoir, Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir (Grove Atlantic, 2016); and three chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent collection, The Cipher, won the 2019 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Before her death in 2020, she taught writing and literature at numerous institutions, including Emory University, Savannah College of Art and Design, and Georgia College and State University. An accomplished baker and recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Brodak’s poems appeared in such publications as Granta, Guernica, and Poetry.

Michelle Peñaloza is the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire (Inlandia Books, 2019), winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015) and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Peñaloza was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She now makes her home in rural northern California.

Eric Pankey has published many collections of poetry. A new book, Not Yet Transfigured, is due out in fall 2021 from Orison Books. He is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University, where he teaches in the BFA and MFA writing programs.

Terrance Hayes’s recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Wave Books, 2018), winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He is a professor of English at New York University.