Katie Peterson is the author of four books of poetry including The Accounts (winner of the 2014 University of North Texas Rilke Prize) and A Piece of Good News. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Davis.

Matthew Zapruder is editor at large for Wave Books, and teaches poetry in the Saint Mary's College of California MFA. His most recent book of poems is Sun Bear. Why Poetry, is his book of prose. 

Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal, winner of the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers' Award, and named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. She has won a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and the Poetry Foundation.

Jericho Brown celebrates his latest book, The Tradition, at this year's AWP. A Guggenheim fellow and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University, he also wrote Please and The New Testament. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and TIME magazine.