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.

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year and winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal, Jessica lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on a collection of poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with her wife Jessica Jacobs, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative.

Joan Houlihan is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if It Lives in Your Chest (Four Way Books, 2021). Her previous books include Shadow-feast, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Mending Worm, winner of the New Issues Green Rose Award; The Us, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; the sequel Ay (both from Tupelo Press); and Hand-Held Executions. Her poems have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries; The Book of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present; The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins; and The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making. She currently serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Houlihan is the founding director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.

Meg Kearney is author of the poetry collections All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize; Home By Now, winner of the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year; and An Unkindness of Ravens (2001). The Ice Storm, a heroic crown, came out with Green Linen Press in 2020. Meg has also published three novels in verse for teens. Her picture book, Trouper (2013), was illustrated by E.B. Lewis and received the Kentucky Bluegrass Award and the Missouri Show Me Reader’s Award. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily, Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column, and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac.” Former Associate Director of the National Book Foundation in New York, Meg is founding director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. For more information: www.megkearney.com.