Danez Smith is the author of three collections of poems, including Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead.

Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute.

Cecily Parks is the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses, and the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Seeds, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books.

Carrie Fountain is a poet, novelist, and children’s book author. She is the author of three poetry collections—The Life, Instant Winner, and Burn Lake, which won the National Poetry Series Award—and the novel I’m Not Missing.

Carolyn Forché’s fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

Carl Phillips is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Phillips has also written three books of prose, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of the book-length narrative Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden; four collections of poetry, including most recently Trophic Cascade; and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers.

Brenda Hillman is the award-winning author of eleven books from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which is In a Few Minutes Before Later.

Dana Naone Hall grew up in Kaneohe, on the island of O’ahu.

Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ʻŌiwi), from the ahupuaʻa of Aʻapueo, Maui, is the author of two poetry collections, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Paʻakai and Āina Hānau, Birth Land, and a critical monograph, Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.