Jane Hirshfield’s most recent books are The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), winner of the Northern California Book Award. A chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield has had work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry.

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.