Paul Guest is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Because Everything Is Terrible, and a memoir, One More Theory About Happiness.

Patricia Smith is the author of Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, including Nightingale, Appropriate: A Provocation, and most recently West: A Translation.

Monica Youn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently From From, which was published in both the United States and in the United Kingdom in 2023.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Story of a Poem, Father’s Day, and Why Poetry. He is editor-at-large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations.

Laura Da’ is the author of the collection of poems Instruments of the True Measure, which won the Washington State Book Award. Her first book, Tributaries, won the 2016 American Book Award. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee and a lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest.

Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia and three other collections of poetry. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released in 2022.

Khadijah Queen, PhD, is the author of six books of innovative poetry and hybrid prose, including most recently Anodyne, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Kevin Young is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Stones, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of H