Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections, Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, a Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship, and the Larry Levis Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among others. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University and is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.

Maggie Smith is the author of, most recently, Good Bones and The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, AGNI, and the Best American Poetry 2017, as well as on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary. A 2011 NEA Fellow, Smith is a freelance writer and editor.

Virgil Suárez is the author of over twenty five books of short fiction, poetry, memoir, and novels. His most recent collection of stories is titled The Soviet Circus Comes to Havana & Other Stories and his most recent collection of poems is titled 90 Miles: Selected and New.