Cleopatra Mathis, author of seven books of poems, has seen her work appear widely in anthologies, magazines, and journals, including the New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, and The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women. She has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Jane Kenyon Award, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Robert Frost Award.

Michael Collier is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in August 2021). He has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and has received numerous honors, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a professor of English at the University of Maryland and emeritus director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.