Sasha West’s first collection, Failure and I Bury the Body (Harper Perennial 2013), was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor of creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award–winning journalist, medical doctor, and author, who traveled to Liberia to report on the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Her poems in this issue, part of a forthcoming book titled If God Is a Virus: The Ebola Poems, are also a result of that reporting trip. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting in 2017 with a team at the Dallas Morning News, Yasmin is a clinical professor at Stanford University where she studies the spread of health misinformation. Her second book, Muslim Women Are Everything, will be published by HarperCollins in April 2020.

Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poems, including his most recent, All Soul Parts Returned (2017) and Theophobia (2012), both from BOA Editions. A native of Macon, Georgia, he lives in Bellingham, Washington, and is a professor of English at Western Washington University.