Anne Waldman is the author of more than forty books, including Fast Speaking Woman and Vow to Poetry, a collection of essays, and The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, an epic poem and twenty-five-year project. With Allen Ginsberg, she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics. She received a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and she has recently been appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Brad Gooch‘s Flannery: A Biography of Flannery O’Connor was a 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times notable book. His short story collection Jailbait and Other Stories won the 1985 Writer’s Choice Award sponsored by the Pushcart Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. A Guggenheim fellow in biography, he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and he is a professor of English at William Paterson University. Gooch is currently at work on a biography and translations of Rumi.

Coleman Barks has collaborated, since 1977, with various Persian scholars (most notably, John Moyne) to bring over into American free verse the poetry of the 13th-century-mystic, Rumi. This work has resulted in twenty-two volumes. He has also published eight volumes of his own poetry.