Martha Collins is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Like Her Body the World: Selected Early Poems (Unbound Edition, 2027), Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022), and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), which won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Numerous other awards include, most recently, the 2025 Golden Rose from the New England Poetry Club. Collins has also published five co-translated volumes of Vietnamese poetry, several co-edited anthologies, and Word Work: Essays, Reviews, Reflections (Tiger Bark, 2025). She founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass Boston and served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College for ten years. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com

Jennifer Franklin is a poet, professor, and editor. She is the author of four poetry collections including A Fire in Her Brain, chosen by Rowan Ricardo Phillips for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, January 2027). The epistolary poems for Lucia Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath from A Fire in Her Brain have been published in American Poetry Review, The Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, The Montreal International Poetry Anthology, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, and The Pushcart Anthology. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and residencies from Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and the T.S. Eliot House in Gloucester, MA. She teaches in Manhattanville’s MFA program, Poets House, The Frost Place, 92NY, Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, and her own manuscript revision workshops. For more information, please visit jenniferfranklinpoet.com

Mary Buchinger is the author of eight poetry collections, including There Is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated which received the Paul Nemser Book Prize Honorable Mention, and Navigating the Reach, which won the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award Honors. Mary teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences  and is a member of Slate Roof Press. Her poetry appears in AGNI, Nimrod, On the Seawall, Plume, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. www.MaryBuchinger.com

Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is an educator, essayist, occasional fiction writer, and author of seven poetry collections, most recently Promises to Keep (Wayfarer Books, 2026). Editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal, a poetry editor at American Poetry Journal, and nonfiction editor at Porcupine Literary, MEH’s publications include Had, Massachusetts Review, Mom Egg Review, Pangyrus The Pedestal Magazine, Ploughshares, Southern Humanities Review, Stone Circle Review, Terrain, and The Worcester Review. MEH earned an MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. He writes about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground at www.MEHPoeting.com.

Jennifer Barber’s new book of poetry is A Prevalence of Angels (The Word Works, 2026). Her previous collections include The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, Works on Paper, Given Away, and Rigging the Wind. She served as poet laureate of Brookline, Massachusetts from 2021 to 2025, and edited the literary journal Salamander from 1992 to 2018. She is the current series editor for The Tenth Gate Prize and is co-editor, with Linda Cutting and Tehila Lieberman, of Blood Moon, a posthumous collection of poems by Carol Dine, published by Cervena Barva Press in 2025. She co-edited the anthology Tree Lines: 21^st Century American Poems with Fred Marchant and Jessica Greenbaum (Grayson Books, 2022).

Salem State Professor J.D. Scrimgeour is the inaugural poet laureate of Salem, Massachusetts. He is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent being Small, Rectangular, Reflected World (Nixes Mate, 2025). He’s also written two books of nonfiction, including Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. A longtime resident of Salem, Scrimgeour has written in many genres about the city, work that is collected in Poet in High Street Park: Prose & Poetry for Modern Salem (Loom Press, 2026). Mary Towne Eastey, an ancestor in his direct line, was put to death during the Salem Witch Trials. Another ancestor, Thomas Perkins, sat on the jury that found her guilty.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn is an Associate Editor-at-Large and features writer for PLUME. She teaches the Personal Essay at the 92^nd Street Y in NYC. Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, New Ohio Review, On the Seawall, The Paris Review, PLUME, Poetry London,  Prairie Schooner, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, and Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her chapbook, Galapagos Poems, was published by Kattywompus Press in 2016. Echolocation was published by Plume Editions/Madhat Press in March 2018. Her fourth book is Alive in These Woods (Cervena Barva Press, September 2026).

Poet, visual artist, and oral historian Susan Eisenberg was among the first women to become a licensed union construction electrician. Her sixth poetry collection, Fault Line (Broadstone, 2026), explores how the political and moral landscape, friendships, and language itself have been altered by the catastrophic destruction in Palestine. Previous books include the nonfiction NYT Notable Book We’ll Call You If We Need You, and the poetry books Stanley’s Girl, Perpetual Care, Blind Spot, Pioneering, and It’s a Good Thing I’m Not Macho. Her touring mixed media art installation, On Equal Terms, exhibited at the AFL-CIO in Washington DC. Honors include the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry, the Joe Hill Award, and the University of Michigan’s Twink Frey Visiting Social Activist fellowship. A Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, she is Poetry Editor of Labor: Studies in Working Class History (Duke).

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.