Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology, Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review.

Natalie Shapero’s latest book is Stay Dead (2025), published in the U.S. by Copper Canyon Press and in the U.K. by Out-Spoken Press. Stay Dead was longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Natalie’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the author of the previous poetry collections Popular Longing (2021), Hard Child (2017), and No Object (2013), and she has performed at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.

Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry: My Destination (forthcoming October 2026), The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. The recipient of Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships, an occasional poetry critic, and member of the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she lives in San Francisco.

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Recent books include a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water. His newest poetry collection, The Man in 119, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2026.

Alan Shapiro has published 14 poetry collections, most recently, By and By, Proceed to Check Out, Against Translation, Reel to Reel, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Night of the Republic, finalist for both the National Book Award and the International Griffin Prize. Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, LA Times Book Prize, and an award in literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new book of poems, Diver, was published by Unbound Edition Press in April, 2026.

Jason Sommer is the author of six poetry collections. Mirror Stage, forthcoming from Unbound Editions, follows Portulans in the University of Chicago Press’s Phoenix Poets series. Among other awards, his books have been honored with a Society of Midland Author’s Prize for Other People’s Troubles and the Crab Orchard Review Prize for The Laughter of Adam and Eve. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, Sommer has won a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award and has held fellowships at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writer’s conferences.  He has published translations of Irish language poems and, with Hongling Zhang, collaborative book-length translations of Chinese fiction: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo and The Bathing Women by Tie Ning, which was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize. Sommer’s latest publication is the memoir Shmuel’s Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father from Charlesbridge Publishing in Watertown, MA.

Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of seven books. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, published by Liveright Press in 2023, was long listed for the National Book Award and is the winner of the 2023 New England Book Award. A recipient of grants and awards from the NEA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Artist Trust, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Poetry, and in anthologies and periodicals such as Asian American Poetry:  The Next Generation and in the New York Times. In 2023 he was appointed as the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA. He is a founding member of Kundiman and he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Canon R6

Jonathan B. Aibel is a poet and recovering software engineer. He was raised in Westport, Connecticut (Paugussett), but he lives in Concord, MA, lands where traditionally the Nipmuc, Pawtucket, Agawam and Massachusett people met. His works are published in many journals, including JAMA, Barrellhouse, Chautauqua, Lily Poetry Review, The Inflectionist, and Pangyrus, and have been anthologized by Massachusetts Bards, Gnashing Teeth Press and Local Gems Press. He has read for the Chapter and Verse series and the Brookline Poetry Series. His poems have been featured on the West Concord Poetry phone. His chapbook Echoes of Uruk was a semi-finalist for the Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize (2024). The Porcelain World is his first full-length collection.

Robin Becker is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including The Black Bear Inside Me and the Lambda Award winner All-American Girl, both published in the Pitt Poetry Series. A liberal arts research professor emerita in English and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she lives in central Pennsylvania and southwestern New Hampshire.

Lloyd Schwartz is the poet laureate of Somerville, MA. His two new books are He Tells His Mother What He’s Working On, a chapbook published by the Grolier Poetry Press, and “Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948)” and Other Poems, published by Arrowsmith. He’s an admired expert on Elizabeth Bishop, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and a recipient of the David Ferry-Ellen LA Forge Annual Poetry Award and the New England Poetry Club’s Sam Cornish Prize.