David Hassler is director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. His poetry collection, Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, was awarded Ohio Poet of the Year 2006. His nonfiction works include the play, May 4th Voices, based on the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project and Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community.

Jane Hirshfield's eight books of poetry include The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award. Her work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, TLS, NYRB, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry. An Academy of American Poets chancellor emerita, she founded Poets For Science in 2017.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of six books of poems, most recently Gentlessness, and three collection of prose, including literary reveries on Melville and Keats. His work has been supported by the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations, and he teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University.

Mark Jarman is the author of The Heronry and Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems, both from Sarabande Books. He has also published two books of essays about poetry, The Secret of Poetry and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry. He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.