Scott Cairns is Professor of English at The University of Missouri, editor of Saint Katherine Review, and director of Writing Workshops in Greece. He has authored six poetry collections, a spiritual memoir, translations of Christian mystics, and a book-length theological essay. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2006.

Gina Franco is the author of The Keepsake Storm. Her honors include the Bread Loaf Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry, the Defined Providence poetry prize, and a Pushcart Special Mention. She teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

Bret Lott is a novelist, memoirist, and professor of creative writing at the College of Charleston. Formerly editor of the Southern Review, he is nonfiction editor of Crazyhorse and a past member of the National Council on the Arts.

Khaled Mattawa’s collections of poetry include Ismailia Eclipse, Zodiac of Echoes, Amorisco, and Tocqueville. His many books of translation include Adonis: Selected Poems and Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef. He is the 2010 recipient of the Academy of American Poets fellowship, and he teaches at the University of Michigan.

Alicia Ostriker's fourteenth collection, The Book of Seventy, received the National Jewish Book Council Award for 2009, and The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011 brought her the Paterson Lifetime Achievement Award. She teaches in the Drew Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program.