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.

Alice Friman’s poetry collections include Blood Weather (LSU Press, 2019), The View from Saturn (LSU Press, 2014), Vinculum (LSU Press, 2011), The Book of the Rotten Daughter (BkMk Press, 2006), Zoo (1999), Inverted Fire (1997), and Reporting from Corinth (1984). A recipient of many honors, including two Pushcart Prizes and inclusion in Best American Poetry, she has been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Plume, Crazyhorse, and others. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she was Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College. 

Maxine Kumin’s seventeenth poetry collection, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (W. W. Norton, 2010), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2011. Kumin’s other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost medals. A former United States poet laureate, Kumin lives with her husband on a farm in the Mink Hills of New Hampshire, where they have raised horses for forty years and enjoyed the companionship of several rescued dogs.

Margaret Gibson is the current poet laureate of Connecticut and the author of twelve books of poems, all from Louisiana State University Press, most recently Not Hearing the Wood Thrush (2018) and The Glass Globe (forthcoming in 2021), as well as a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter (University of Missouri Press, 2008). The Vigil (1993) was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry; Broken Cup (2016) was a finalist for the Poets’ Prize, and its title poem won a Pushcart Prize that year. Gibson is professor emerita at the University of Connecticut.

Keith Ratzlaff teaches poetry and literature at Central College in Pella, Iowa. His most recent books of poetry, Then, A Thousand Crows (2009) and Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee (2005), are from Anhinga Press, as will be his next, Who’s Asking? His poems and reviews have appeared recently in the Cincinnati Review, Arts and Letters, Colorado Review, and the American Reader; his honors include the Theodore Roethke Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2009. 

David Clewell is the author of several collections of poems—most recently, Taken Somehow By Surprise (University of Wisconsin, 2011). He teaches writing and literature at Webster University in St. Louis and served as Missouri’s poet laureate from 2010–12. His claim to Charlie-the-Tuna-collecting fame is not at all overinflated.