Cathy Smith Bowers’ collections of poetry include Like Shining from Shook Foil (2010), The Candle I Hold Up to See You (2009), and A Book of Minutes (2004), and her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry, the Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. For many years the poet-in-residence at Queens University of Charlotte, Bowers currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens and in the Haden Institute Spiritual Direction and Dream Leadership programs. From 2010 to 2012, she was poet laureate of North Carolina.

Kyoko Uchida’s poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in The Georgia Review, Manoa, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals on three continents; her poetry collection Elsewhere was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2012. Uchida works for a nonprofit organization in New York City.

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.