Tiana Nobile is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. A finalist in the National Poetry Series and for the Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is the author of a chapbook, The Spirit of the Staircase (Antenna / Press Street Press, 2017). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, the New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. 

William Virgil Davis’s most recent book of poetry is Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New (Texas Review Press, 2015). He has published five other books of poetry, among them Landscape and Journey (Ivan R. Dee, 2009), which won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry, and One Way to Reconstruct the Scene (1980), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His poems have appeared in most of the major periodicals, here and abroad, including the Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, and many others.

Richard Jackson has published fifteen books of poems and is the author or editor of multiple critical monographs, books in translation, and anthologies. His most recent books are Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018) and Out of Place (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014); “Take Five,” a prose poetry project with four other poets, is forthcoming.

J. Allyn Rosser’s fourth poetry collection, Mimi’s Trapeze, appeared in 2014 from Pittsburgh University Press. Rosser has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Ohio Arts Council. She teaches at Ohio University.

William Wenthe is the author of four books of poems, including his most recent collection, God’s Foolishness (LSU Press, 2016). He has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. “The Trial” is part of a larger project about the American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler.

Margaret Gibson is the current poet laureate of Connecticut and the author of twelve books of poems, all from Louisiana State University Press, most recently Not Hearing the Wood Thrush (2018) and The Glass Globe (forthcoming in 2021), as well as a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter (University of Missouri Press, 2008). The Vigil (1993) was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry; Broken Cup (2016) was a finalist for the Poets’ Prize, and its title poem won a Pushcart Prize that year. Gibson is professor emerita at the University of Connecticut.