Lannan Fellow & Whiting Award winner, Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, among other honors. Laurentiis is currently the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics in Pittsburgh.

Dawn Lundy Martin, PhD., is Professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her books include A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering; Discipline, finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life; and Good Stock, Strange Blood.

Justin Phillip Reed is the author of Indecency.

Erin Belieu is the author of four poetry collections, including Slant Six, chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2014. Recent poems appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and American Poetry Review. Belieu teaches in the Florida State CW MFA/PhD program, and Lesley University's low residency MFA.

Carl Phillips is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind, as well as the book of essays The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.