Jen Benka is the Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets. She worked previously as the managing director of Poets & Writers and for 826 National. She is the author of Pinko and A Box of Longing with Fifty Drawers. Jen holds an MFA from the New School.

Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series; and Wind in a Box. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds. He is a recipient of the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize, a 2014 Pushcart Prize, and the 2013 BPJ Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. Poems appear in Poetry, the Nation, New Republic, and the New Yorker, among others.