Paul Zimmer lives on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin. In the fifteen years since his retirement from a long career in university publishing, he has published two books each of poetry and essay-memoir. His first novel, The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove, is forthcoming from Permanent Press in early 2015, when he will be eighty years old—which surely makes him, he believes, one of the oldest first novelists ever.

Michael Waters’s recent and forthcoming books include The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Celestial Joyride (BOA Editions, 2016), and a coedited anthology, Reel Verse: Poems about the Movies (Knopf, 2019). A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, Waters teaches at Monmouth University and for the Drew University MFA program. He is also the recipient of five Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

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.