Caribbean-American poet Amy M. Alvarez is the winner of both the 2025 American Book Award and CariCon Poetry Prize for her book, Makeshift Altar (2024). She is also the co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (2023).  She currently teaches writing and literature at Boston College.

Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Harvest of What Remains, received honorable mention for the Paul Nemser Prize and was published in January by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Mid-American Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She was awarded the 2025 E.E. Cummings prize from the New England Poetry Club. A recipient of the 2021 Juror’s Prize for Art on the Trails, Southborough, MA, Wendy served as poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, from 2018-2023 and as programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club from 2016–2024.

Pamela Alexander’s Left won the 2024 Beloit Poetry Journal chapbook competition. She has four previous collections, including Slow Fire (Ausable/Copper Canyon). Earlier books won the Yale Younger Poets and Iowa Poetry Prizes, and her work has appeared in many periodicals, most recently Plume, descant, Ocean State Review, Red Letters and Southern Poetry Review. She taught creative writing at M.I.T. and Oberlin College and served on the editorial boards of Wesleyan University Press and FIELD magazine. Honors include fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center, MacDowell, and the Bunting Institute.

K. T. Landon’s debut collection, Abide, was selected by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2025 Richard Snyder Memorial Poetry Prize and will be published this fall by Ashland Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Sun, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, North American Review, and Best New Poets, among others. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a reader for Lily Poetry Review.

Andrea Cohen’s most recent poetry collection is The Sorrow Apartments,was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  A ninth poetry collection, Sugar, will be out in early 2026. Her poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Boston University and directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

Steven Ratiner is the author of Grief’s Apostrophe, published by Beltway Editions in 2025.  He’s also published three poetry chapbooks and a collection of poetry interviews.  His work has appeared in scores of journals in America and abroad, including Parnassus, Agni, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, Salamander, Vox Populi,  QRLS (Singapore), and Poetry Australia.  He’s also written poetry criticism for The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post.  GIVING THEIR WORD – Conversations with Contemporary Poets was reissued in a paperback edition (University of Massachusetts Press).  He is Poet Laureate Emeritus for Arlington, Massachusetts, and was elected in 2024 as President of the New England Poetry Club, one of the oldest literary associations in America.  Now in its sixth year, his weekly Red Letter Poems features a diverse range of poets, from up-and-coming talents to some of the most important voices in contemporary poetry (stevenratiner.com).

Jake Skeets is the author of two books of poetry, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award, and the highly anticipated second collection, Horses. His work has appeared in journals and magazines such as Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. Other honors include an NEA Grant for Arts Projects, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is the third Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.

A 2023 New Jersey Council on the Arts Poetry Fellow, Robin Rosen Chang is the author of the full-length collection, The Curator’s Notes (2021). Her poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Plume, and have been featured on Verse Daily. She was an honorable mention for the Spoon River Review’s 2019 Editor’s Prize and the winner of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Poet’s Choice Award. She has an MFA in poetry from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a co-founder and director of The Fields Poetry Reading Series and teaches writing at Montclair State University.

Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser’s honors include the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award, and Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee, and MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts.  For more information visit: http://kblaeser.org

Shannon K. Winston is the author of The Worry Dolls (Glass Lyre Press, 2025) and The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, the Los Angeles Review, RHINO Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA in poetry from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She currently works at Indiana University and lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her family.