Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her next collection, a hybrid of essays and poems, Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.
Erica Charis-Molling is a poet, educator, and librarian. Her writing has been published in literary journals including Tinderbox, Redivider, Presence, Crosswinds, Glass, Anchor, Vinyl, Entropy, Apricity, and Mezzo Cammin. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Orison anthology. She’s an alum of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University. She currently lives in Boston and works as Education Director for Mass Poetry.
Gina Franco‘s second collection of poems, The Accidental, was awarded the 2019 CantoMundo Poetry Prize and was published with the University of Arkansas Press. She is also the author of The Keepsake Storm (University of Arizona Press), and her writing has appeared in journals such 32 Poems, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Image, Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review, Narrative, and Poetry. She divides her time between Galesburg, Illinois, where she teaches at Knox College, and the West Texas borderlands, her family’s home.
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. After earning a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in San Francisco, and she spent ten summers on the staff of the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.
Phillis Levin is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her newest book, Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin, 2016), was selected by Library Journal as one of their Top Picks in poetry for spring 2016. She is the author of four other poetry collections, Temples and Fields (The University of Georgia Press, 1988), The Afterimage (Copper Beech Press, 1995), Mercury (Penguin, 2001), and May Day (Penguin, 2008), and is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (Penguin, 2001). Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Bogliasco Fellowship, and grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume, PN Review, Poetry magazine, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, and many other magazines and anthologies. Levin has served as an editor of Boulevard and an Elector of the American Poets Corner of The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. She has taught at the University of Maryland, the Johns Hopkins University, The Unterberg Poetry Center, New York University, and The New School, and currently is a professor of English and the poet-in-residence at Hofstra University. She lives with her husband in New York City.
Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, West Branch Wired, The Common, upstreet, and Foundry, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College.
Mary Ann Samyn is the author of six collections—most recently, Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance, winner of the 2017 42 Miles Press Award, and My Life in Heaven, winner of the 2012 Field Prize. She teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University.
Sandy Solomon is the author of “On ‘Adlestrop,'” as well as Pears, Lake, Sun (University of Pittsburgh Press). Her poems have appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, New Republic, Partisan Review, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Poems are forthcoming in Plume and Vox Populi. A former contributor, Sandy Solomon also wrote “On ‘Adlestrop.” She teaches in Vanderbilt University’s Creative Writing Program. Her website, terribly out of date, is www.sandysolomon.com.