Gordon Johnston has published a short story, a conversation with poet Pattiann Rogers, and two reviews in past issues of The Georgia Review. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in American Fiction, Southern Poetry Review, Many Mountains Moving, Fourth Genre, and other journals.

Lisa Starr is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Rhode Island and a two-time recipient of the Rhode Island Fellowship in Poetry. She founded the Block Island Poetry Project and served as its director for thirteen years. Starr has published three full-length collections of poetry, most recently Mad With Yellow (2008), and she co-edited Where Beach Meets Ocean, an anthology celebrating ten years of the BIPP, in 2013. Retired, temporarily, after eighteen years running a ten-room guest house on Block Island, Starr is currently working on a memoir, “Writer, Inn-terrupted,” and a collection of poems for and about children, titled “Orrin and Millie and Brother and Me.”

Naomi Shihab Nye’s most recent books are Famous (Wings Press, 2015), illustrated by Lisa Desimini, and The Turtle of Oman (Greenwillow, 2014). Nye has held Lannan, Guggenheim, and Witter Bynner fellowships, and she has won a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, “The Betty Prize” from Poets House for service to poetry, and two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards.

Norman Minnick is the author of two collections of poetry: Folly (Wind Publishing, 2013) and To Taste the Water: Poems (2007). He is the editor of Jim Watt’s Work Toward Knowing: Beginning with Blake (Kinchafoonee Creek Press, 2016) and Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press, 2010).