Dorothy Derifield is the director of the long-running literary reading series, Chapter and Verse in Jamaica Plain. She is also a member of the committee that directs the Rozzie Reads Poetry Reading Series in Roslindale. She is the author of the book Zero Plus Time (Cherry Grove Collections, 2020) and a chapbook, The River and the Lakes. Her work has won an Editor’s Award from Plainsongs and has appeared in the Radcliffe Quarterly among other journals. She is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets and lives in Roslindale.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Oxford American, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she is working on a poetry and nonfiction collection while raising her son in Los Angeles. Her essay collection, CHUECA, is forthcoming from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2023. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.

Monica McAlpine published her first book of poems, Winter Bride (Main Street Rag Press, 2021) at age eighty. Other poems of hers have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Leon, Poetry Quarterly, The Aurorean, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Professor Emerita at University of Massachusetts Boston, where she taught for thirty-six years and directed the Honors Program, McAlpine is the author of two books and several articles on medieval literature. She has exhibited her paintings with local art associations. She and her husband live in Brookline; they have two grandchildren.

Cammy Thomas’ first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. Her third collection, Tremors, has just come out. All are published by Four Way Books. Far Past War, a choral work by composer Augusta Read Thomas based on two of her poems, will premiere at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in 2022. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Ilene H. Rudman is a Boston-area poet, career counselor and psychotherapist. Her poems have appeared in various journals including: The Comstock Review, CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Crab Creek Review, the anthology Kind of Hurricane Press, Apeiron Review, An Anthology of New England Writers, Passengers, and LEON Literary Review. Her first chapbook Staying the Night, recently published by Finishing Line Press, was a finalist in the 2019 Comstock Review’s Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest.

Paul Nemser is the author of A Thousand Curves, which won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press, and was published in April 2021. His book Taurus (2013) won the New American Poetry Prize. Tales of the Tetragrammaton (2014), a chapbook, was published by Mayapple Press. Nemser’s poems appear widely in magazines, including AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, London Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Plume, and TriQuarterly. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, MA, and Harborside, ME.

Gail Mazur’s eighth collection, Land’s End: New & Selected Poems, was published in 2020. Earlier books include: Forbidden City; Figures in a Landscape; Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems, winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award and finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and They Can’t Take That Away from Me, finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. She is a former fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and has taught widely including in Boston University’s MFA in Writing Program and in The Fine Art Work Center’s Summer Program. Mazur is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series which she directed for 29 years and is now directed by Andrea Cohen.

Roger Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and two Pushcart Prizes, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Princeton University. An associate professor of poetry in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin, his second collection of poetry, Best Barbarian, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.

Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), Mixology (Penguin, 2009), and The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), which focuses on Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion of the world and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His fourth collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017. Forthcoming in 2021 are a mixed media collection inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books), and a collection of poems Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin). His first graphic novel Last On His Feet will be published in 2022 by Liveright. Among Matejka’s honors are fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University Bloomington and served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19.

Danielle Legros Georges is a writer, academic, and author of several books of poetry including The Dear Remote Nearness of You, winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motten book prize. Her honors include fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. She is the former Poet Laureate of the city of Boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019. She directs and teaches in the Lesley MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her most recent work is a book of translations, Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert, published in 2021.