Erin Adair-Hodges is the author of Let’s All Die Happy, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Every Form of Ruin, both from the Pitt Poetry Series. Recipient of the Allen Tate Prize and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, her work has been featured in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and more. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Adirondack Center for Writing, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in New Mexico, she now lives with her family in Kansas City, Missouri.
Martha Collins’s eleventh volume of poetry, Casualty Reports, was published by Pittsburgh in fall 2022; her fifth collection of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, was published by Milkweed in spring 2023. Her tenth book of her poetry, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award; her earlier books, which have won a number of awards, include three focusing on race and racism (Admit One: An American Scrapbook, White Papers, and Blue Front). Collins founded the U.Mass. Boston creative writing program and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jennifer Franklin holds degrees from Brown University and Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023). Franklin received a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant and a 2021 Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Her work has been published widely including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, and in the Poetry Society’s “Poetry in Motion” series. Most recently, Diane Seuss chose one of Franklin’s poems for The Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” series. She teaches workshops in Manhattanville’s MFA program and manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as Program Director.
Daisy Fried is the author of four books of poetry: The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships. She is an occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere; poetry editor for the journal Scoundrel Time; and a member of the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Philadelphia.
Kelle Groom‘s newest book is How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays (Tupelo Press, October 2023). Her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster 2011 / pb 2012), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Month, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. Her four poetry collections are Spill, (Anhinga Press), Five Kingdoms (Anhinga), Luckily (Anhinga), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, New England Review, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and her nonfiction and photography will be featured in Virginia Quarterly Review’s “True Story” this Fall. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, and two-time Florida Book Award winner in Poetry, Groom’s honors also include fellowships from Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada-Las Vegas in partnership with the Library of Congress, Civitella Ranieri, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, James Merrill House, Millay Colony for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, American Antiquarian Society, and Ucross Foundation, as well as two Florida Book Awards, a State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs grant, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. Groom was previously Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe. She has also served as Nonfiction Editor for AGNI Magazine and Poetry Editor of The Florida Review.
Airea D. Matthews is the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections: Simulacra, which won the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; and Bread and Circus, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her writing and service have earned Matthews several awards including a Guggenheim, a Pew, and a Rona Jaffe—as well as several fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem, and Callaloo.
Her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Gulf Coast, VQR, Best American Poets, American Poet, Lithub, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She was the sixth poet laureate of Philadelphia and is currently an associate professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented a Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award and, more recently, a Rossabeth Moss Kanter Change Master Fund award. She is developing an arts refuge in Troina, Sicily in her spare time.
Nathan McClain is the author of two collections of poetry—Previously Owned (2022) and Scale (2017)—both from Four Way Books, a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a graduate from the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Plume Poetry Anthology 10, The Common, Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, and Zocalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.
Tyler Mills is the author of City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, Diode Editions 2021). Her memoir, The Bomb Cloud, received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC and is forthcoming from Unbound Edition Press in 2024. A poet and essayist, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She lived and taught in New Mexico four years, most recently serving as the Burke Scholar for the Doel Reed Center for the Arts in Taos, NM, and now teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Emily Nemens is the author of The Cactus League. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, The Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere. Emily spent a dozen years editing literary quarterlies, including leading The Paris Review, which won its first American Society of Magazine Editors’ Award for Fiction under her tenure; she also served as co-editor of The Southern Review. She held the 2022-23 Picador Professorship (University of Leipzig) and teaches community-based fiction workshops.
Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022) which won the 2022 National Jewish Book award. He runs a manuscript consultation service at www.seansingerpoetry.com
Nova Ren Suma is a New York Times bestselling author of young adult novels and a two-time Edgar Award finalist. Her latest YA novel A Room Away from the Wolves was an Edgar Award finalist and called “shiver-inducingly delicious” by the New York Times. Her other novels include the #1 New York Times bestselling The Walls Around Us as well as Imaginary Girls, and she was co-editor of the story & writing craft anthology FORESHADOW: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading & Writing YA. She is a MacDowell fellow and a Yaddo fellow and has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her next novel is forthcoming from Algonquin in 2025.