Chelsea Rathburn is the author of Still Life with Mother and Knife, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in February 2019. Her two previous poetry collections are A Raft of Grief and The Shifting Line.  Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals. In 2009, she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007.

Rosa Lane, PhD, MFA, AIA, is author of three poetry collections: Chouteau's Chalk, winner of the 2017 Georgia Poetry Prize, forthcoming February 2019 from the University of Georgia Press; Tiller North (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016), winner of a 2017 National Indie Excellence Award and 2017 Maine Literary Award for Short Works, 5-poem excerpt; and a chapbook, Roots and Reckonings (Granite Press, East). Lane earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied with Jean Valentine, Jane Cooper, Grace Paley, and Tom Lux.

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers writes, performs and teaches Creative Writing at Wits University, Johannesburg. Her poetry collections are Taller than buildings (2006) and The everyday wife (2010, winner of the South African Literary Prize in 2011), and ice- cream headache in my bone (August 2017). Her short story Keeping Everything the Same was longlisted for the Pen/Studinski Prize in 2007, and her story The day that Jesus dropped the ball won the 2007 Het Beschrijf/National Arts Festival Prize at the Grahamstown Festival.

David Tomas Martinez's debut collection of poetry, Hustle, was released in 2014 by Sarabande Books. Martinez is a Pushcart winner, CantoMundo fellow, a Breadloaf Stanley P. Young Fellow, and NEA fellow. Post Traumatic Hood Disorder, a second collection, was released by Sarabande Books in 2018. Martinez lives in Brooklyn.

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body. Her poetry collections have also been published in Belarus, Germany, and Sweden. She has received the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry, the Amy Clampitt Fellowship, and the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University.

Kamilah Aisha Moon is a Pushcart Prize winner, CLMP Firecracker Award and Lambda Award finalist, and a 2015 New American Poet who has received fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Rose O'Neill Literary House, Hedgebrook, and Cave Canem. The author of Starshine & Clay (2017) and She Has a Name (2013), both published by Four Way Books, her work has been featured widely, including the Harvard Review, Poem A Day, Prairie Schooner, Oxford American and elsewhere.

Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos.