Nancy Naomi Carlson’s translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull Books, 2021) won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Delicates (Seagull Books, 2023), her co-translation of Wendy Guerra, was noted in the New York Times, as was her poetry collection An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019). Piano in the Dark, her third full-length volume of poetry, arrives this fall, also from Seagull. She serves as the translations editor for On the Seawall.

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.

Gaylord Brewer’s most recent books are a ninth collection of poetry, Country of Ghost (Red Hen Press, 2015), and the cookbook-memoir The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2015). He has published widely in journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he is the founding editor of the journal Poems & Plays.

LaWanda Walters is the author of Light Is the Odalisque (Press 53, Silver Concho Poetry Series, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The American Journal of Poetry, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, and other literary magazines, as well as in Best American Poetry and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014). She lives in Cincinnati and received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020.

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. 

Suzanne Cleary won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry for her third book, Beauty Mark (BkMk Press, 2013). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she teaches in the low-residency MFA in creative writing program at Converse College.

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.