C. Dylan Bassett’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Anti-, Columbia, DMQ Review, iO Poetry, the Pinch, Salamander, Steam Ticket, Tar River Poetry, Word Riot and elsewhere. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a fellowship from the Morrie Moss Foundation for Poetry.

Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her work has been published in AGNI, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Santa Fe Arts Institute, Candito is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville and a co-curator of the Monsters of Poetry Reading Series in Madison, WI.

Brian Culhane’s first book The King’s Question (Graywolf), was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson Prize. His work has appeared in such places as The Hudson Review, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in PN Review (UK), Sewanee Review, Literary Imagination, American Literary Review, Able Muse, Lucid Rhythms, Massachusetts Review, Southwest Review, and Parnassus. He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Artist Trust of Washington Humanities. He teaches at an independent school in Seattle.

Anthony Deaton’s poems have appeared in such journals as Virginia Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, The Nation andthe Paris Review. He is the author of the fine arts press chapbook Rhumb Lines (Sutton Hoo Press) and the recipient of a Discovery/The Nation Award and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. He is a Foreign Service Officer with the State Department and currently lives in Namibia.

Joanne Diaz’s first book The Lessons won the Gerald Cable Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2011. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and received her MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in RATTLE, Upstairs at Duroc and Media Fields: Science and Scale. She is the poetry editor of the anthology Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books) and is the author of two chapbooks: Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes me Blue (Dancing Girl Press). Currently, she is teaching poetry in the Creative Writing department at Boston University.

Michelle Matthees’ work can be found in PANK, The Prose Poem Project, 22 Magazine, The Bellingham Review, Bloomsbury Review, Cerise Press, Cider Press Review, Proof, and elsewhere. She is a current recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and has received awards in the past from Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, The Jerome Foundation, AWP, and other arts organizations. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in Creative Writing and lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

Gail Mazur, the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is author of seven books of poems, including Forbidden City (University of Chicago Press 2016) Figures in a Landscape (University of Chicago 2011); Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems (Chicago 2005), winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award, a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; and They Can’t Take That Away from Me (2001), a finalist for the National Book Award. Mazur was a 2009 Fellow in Poetry at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, a 1996 Fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the 2005 recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award. For many years Distinguished Writer in Residence in Emerson College’s MFA program, Mazur’s also been visiting faculty at Boston University, University of Houton, and University of California, Irvine, and continues to teach poetry workshops in the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown’s summer program. Land’s End: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2019.

Jill McDonough is the author of Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008), Oh, James! (Seven Kitchens, 2012), Where You Live (Salt, 2012), and REAPER, forthcoming from Alice James Books. She is the winner of a 2014 Lannan Literary Fellowship and three Pushcart prizes. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and Stanford’s Stegner program, she taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program for thirteen years. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry. She directs the MFA program at UMass-Boston and 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online.

Jessica Murray is a poet and educator living in Denton, TX. Poems of hers have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Like Starlings, and Shenandoah. Her website, if-you-want-to.com, features linked interviews with contemporary women poets.

Ed Pavlić’s most recent books are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009), Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (UGA P, 2008) and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE, 2006). His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon P, 2001) and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minn P, 2002). He lives in Athens, Georgia.

Pete Pazmino is a graduate of the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has been published in JMWW, Monkeybicycle, Brink Magazine, The Meadowland Review, A Cappella Zoo, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) and has received editor nominations for the storySouth Million Writers Award in both 2009 and 2010. He blogs, occasionally and sometimes with enthusiasm, at www.petepazmino.com.

Michael C. Peterson’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Western Humanities Review, Fence, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is currently working toward a PhD as an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.

Ian Stansel’s debut collection will be released from FiveChapters Books in 2013. His work has previously appeared in Ploughshares, Ecotone, FiveChapters, Antioch Review, Sycamore Review, The Journal, Barrelhouse, and other literary journals, as well as on Salon.com and the Good Men Project. Two stories of his have been selected for inclusion in the New Stories of the Midwest anthology series. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Houston.

Jean Valentine’s translations with Ilya Kaminsky, Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, were released by Alice James Books in 2012. She is the author of eleven books of poetry, including her most recent collection, Break the Glass (Copper Canyon, 2010) and National Book Award winner Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 (Wesleyan,2004). Valentine is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize, as well as awards from the NEA, The Radcliffe Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Robert Van Vranken’s work has been shown at numerous galleries and museums, including the DeCordova Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the Knoxville Museum of Art, and OK Harris gallery in New York. He is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.

Jakob VanLammeren earned his MFA in poetry from Bennington College, and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois where he works as an archivist. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in burntdistrict, Chicago IRL, diode, Explosion Proof Magazine, Gigantic Sequins, Hanging Loose magazine, and Pebble Lake Review. Visit him at http://jakobrvanlammeren.tumblr.com.

Kathleen Winter is the author of Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir Press), winner of the Antivenom Poetry Prize and the Bob Bush Memorial Award for a first book. She will be the fall 2015 Dobie Paisano Fellow in Austin, TX. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, AGNI, Gulf Coast and Poetry London.