Maurya Simon’s tenth volume of poetry, The Wilderness: New & Selected Poems, 1980–2016, was recently published by Red Hen Press (2018). Other recent publications include The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome & St. Paula (Elixir Press, 2010), and Questions My Daughter Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Her (Blackbird Press, 2014). Simon has received an NEA Fellowship in poetry and two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and this fall she will serve her third visiting artist residency at the American Academy in Rome. Simon is currently a Professor of the Graduate Division and a Professor Emerita at the University of California–Riverside, where she taught literature and creative writing for nearly thirty years.

Karen Swenson has published five volumes of poetry, been included in numerous anthologies, and appeared in The New Yorker, Saturday Review, Poetry, Commonweal, Miramar, The Nation, and other publications. Also the author of travel and political articles for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Swenson presently lives in Barcelona, Spain.

William Trowbridge’s latest collection, Put This On, Please: New and Selected Poems, was published in March 2013 by Red Hen Press. His other collections include Ship of Fool (Red Hen, 2011), and The Complete Book of Kong (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in more than thirty-five anthologies and textbooks, as well as on The Writer’s Almanac and in such periodicals as Poetry and the Gettysburg Review. Currently poet laureate of Missouri, Trowbridge lives in the Kansas City area and teaches in the University of Nebraska low-residency MFA in writing program.