Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker and elsewhere. She is the programs director at Cave Canem Foundation.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Tina Chang is the Brooklyn Poet Laureate. Author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers, she is also coeditor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond.

Ross Gay is the author of three books of poems: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call It Ballin’, he is an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press and a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University.

Patricia Smith's books are Incendiary Art, Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, the 2013 Lenore Marshall prizewinner, and Blood Dazzler, a 2008 National Book Award finalist. A 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and twice a Pushcart prizewinner, she is a professor at CUNY and in Sierra Nevada's MFA program.