Michael Waters’s recent and forthcoming books include The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Celestial Joyride (BOA Editions, 2016), and a coedited anthology, Reel Verse: Poems about the Movies (Knopf, 2019). A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, Waters teaches at Monmouth University and for the Drew University MFA program. He is also the recipient of five Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

David Wagoner has published nineteen books of poems—most recently After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)—and ten novels, including The Escape Artist (1965), which Francis Ford Coppola made into a movie in 1982. Winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and many other honors, he was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years, edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002, and is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.