Stephen Dunn is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. His Degrees of Fidelity: Essays on Poetry and the Latitudes of the Personal,  is due out from Tiger Bark Press in October 2018, and a new collection of poems, Pagan Virtues, is scheduled to be published by W. W. Norton in 2019. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Different Hours, and he has had fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Dunn lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.

Albert Goldbarth is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, most recently Selfish (2015), Everyday People (2012), and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972–2007 (2007), all from Graywolf Press. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.