Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, New and Selected Poems, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship, and from 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is an Irish poet, theologian, and seasoned broadcaster. He hosts Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and has published critical and theological essays, a memoir, and multiple volumes of poetry. His writing has previously been published in Kenyon Review, the New England Review, Poetry Ireland, Harvard Review, and others. In 2025, he published Kitchen Hymns, a poetry collection, with Copper Canyon Press (and CHEERIO in the U.K.), and the anthology 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection with Canongate and W.W. Norton.

Working fluently on the page and in public, he is a compelling writer and skilled speaker, teacher and group worker. He holds undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in theology, multiple professional qualifications in conflict mediation, and a PhD in Poetry and Theology from the University of Glasgow. From 2014-2019 he was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community. For the fall terms of 2024-28, he is a visiting scholar at the Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University.