Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) authored ten collections of poems and four works of nonfiction. Elegy Landscape: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime, his most recent book, was published by W. W. Norton in 2018. His many honors and awards include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Truman Capote Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. He was the founding director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Maryland, where he had been a professor of English since 1985. Middle Distance, a collection of poems he finished before his death, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2020.

Pattiann Rogers has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently Holy Heathen Rhapsody (Penguin, 2013), and a selection of her uncollected poems is forthcoming from Penguin/Random House in 2018. A gathering of 329 journals and magazines containing her poems was recently acquired by Texas Tech University and is housed in the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World.