David Swanger has published four books of poetry, two chapbooks, and poems in various anthologies and journals. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. His most recent book, Wayne’s College of Beauty (2006), won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize.

John Stone (1936–2008) was a four-time Georgia Writer of the Year, a 1992 recipient of the Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities, and an honored emeritus professor of cardiology at the Emory University School of Medicine. Beginning in 1969, he attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, where he served as resident physician for three summers. His first book of poetry, The Smell of Matches (1972), was followed by In All This Rain (1980), Renaming the Streets (1985), Where Water Begins (1998), and Music from Apartment 8 (2004). Stone was also an acclaimed essayist—his collection In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine (1990) earned Stone his fourth Georgia Writer of the Year Award, and his first for nonfiction. He died in Atlanta in 2008. (Inducted in 2007)

Chris Forhan is the author of three books of poetry: Black Leapt In (2009), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (2003), winner of the Morse Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award; and Forgive Us Our Happiness (1999), winner of the Bakeless Prize. A professor at Butler University, he is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes.

Diane Seuss’s Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open won the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming this spring from the University of Massachusetts Press. Recent work has appeared in Poetry, New Orleans Review, Brevity, and Blackbird. Seuss is currently writer in residence at Kalamazoo College.