Andrea Hollander’s first published poem appeared in the Winter 1982 issue of The Georgia Review. Her first full-length poetry collection won the 1993 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize; her fourth was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. Her many other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and creative nonfiction) and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. After living in the woods of the Arkansas Ozarks for thirty-five years, she moved to downtown Portland, Oregon, in 2011.

Linda Pastan’s fourteenth book of poems, Insomnia, will be published by W. W. Norton in the fall of 2015. Recent poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the Gettysburg Review. Her books have twice been finalists for the National Book Award, and in 2003 she won the Ruth Lily Prize for lifetime achievement. She was poet laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995.

Susan Ludvigson, Professor Emerita at Winthrop University, was the 2014 winner of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points magazine. She has published eight collections of poems with LSU Press, including Escaping the House of Certainty (2006). The first line of “Dead,” appearing here, is the title of her next collection. Most recently, her poems can be found in the Yale Review and the Southern Review.