Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry: My Destination (forthcoming from Flood Editions and Carcanet Press in 2026), The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. An occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere, she lives in Philadelphia, but will be moving to San Francisco later this year.
Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press) and Sky Country (BOA Editions), which won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press) won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. She is co-editor of They Rise Like a Wave (Blue Oak Press), an anthology of Asian American women and nonbinary poets. She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University.
Airea D. Matthews is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. She was awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, fellowships from Bread Loaf and Cave Canem, and a Kresge Literary Arts award. She teaches at Bryn Mawr.
Peter Orner is the author of Maggie Brown & Others, a novella and stories, two story collections, Esther Stories and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and a book of essays/ memoir, Am I Alone Here?, a Finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. A new collection of essays, Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin came out in October, 2022. Peter is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Fulbright Foundations, and his fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Granta, and Best American Stories. Peter has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Northwestern, the University of Montana, Bard College, Charles University (Prague), the University of Namibia, and San Francisco State University. He currently directs the Creative Writing program at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.
Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the novel We Sinners, which received the 2012 Whiting Award, and the novel The End of Drum-Time, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and LitHub. She is the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Lásságámmi Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.
Alan Williamson recently retired from the University of California at Davis. He has also taught at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Brandeis. His books of poems are Presence, The Muse of Distance, Love and the Soul, Res Publica, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems and Franciscan Notes. He has also published five critical books: Introspection and Contemporary Poetry; Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell; Eloquence and Mere Life; Almost a Girl: Male Writers and Female Identification, and Westernness: A Meditation. He has done a number of translations from the Italian, including The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, co-translated with Jeanne Foster. He has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.
C. Dale Young received his BS in Molecular Biology and English from Boston College and both his MFA and MD from the University of Florida. He completed his medical residency in Radiation Oncology at the University of California San Francisco. He currently administers his own medical practice, practices medicine full-time, and serves as President and Chief of Sequoia Hospital’s Medical Staff. A recipient of the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing in 2014, he edited poetry for New England Review from 1995-2014. In 2017, he was awarded the Hanes Award in Poetry by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the author of a novel and five collections of poetry, the most recent being Prometeo (2021). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, his work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including several volumes of The Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Poetry.
Sally Ball is the author of three collections of poems, Hold Sway, Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis. She has published essays and reviews in Lithub, NOR, Pleiades, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in APR, Bennington, Boston, and Harvard Reviews, Ploughshares, Tin House, Yale Review, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry anthology. Professor of English and director of creative writing at Arizona State University, Ball is also the associate director of Four Way Books. Her long poem “HOLD” has been made into a large-format artist’s book by the Czech printmaker Jan Vičar (2018).
Dominic Smith is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and published in more than a dozen countries. His latest novel, Return to Valetto—set in the world of abandoned and dwindling Italian towns and villages—was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in June 2023 and received the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction. Dominic’s short stories, essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian. A graduate of the University of Iowa and the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, Dominic is the recipient of the Australian Indie Book of the Year Award, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Australian Council for the Arts. He grew up in Australia and currently lives in Seattle.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), and including the forthcoming Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

