Moderator:

Steve Woodward is an editor at Graywolf Press. He has an MFA from the University of Michigan and teaches at Sierra Nevada College.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties and the forthcoming memoir House in Indiana. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Guernica, NPR Books, and elsewhere. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Clarion SF&F Writers' Workshop.

Stephen (also Steph or Stephanie) Burt, professor of English at Harvard, is the author of several books of poetry and criticism, most recently Advice from the LIghts and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them.

Danez Smith is the author of Don't Call Us Dead and [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lamda Literary Award. They are a Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. a two-time World Poetry Slam finalist, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, and a 2017 NEA poetry fellow.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two volumes of poetry, Seam (2014) and the forthcoming Register of Illuminated Villages (2018). Faizullah is the recipient of three Pushcart prizes, a GLCA New Writers Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, among other honors. Faizullah received an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, and is currently Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor of creative writing in poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program.