Karen Schubert, founding director of Lit Youngstown in 2015, is a NEOMFA graduate and author of The Compost Reader and five poetry chapbooks. She has taught in numerous academic and community settings. Her awards include residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center.

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.

Amy Bagwell's poems are/have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, Free State Review, Cloudbank, Watershed Review, and elsewhere. She is cofounder of Wall Poems, Inc., a nonprofit public art project with 25+ large-scale poetry murals and installations in and around Charlotte, North Carolina.

Michael Khandelwal writes and publishes fiction and poetry and teaches workshops for the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, for which he is the executive director (and cofounder). He is a columnist for Coastal Virginia Magazine and a former webmaster for the American Council on Education.

Noah Falck is the author of the poetry collection Exclusions (finalist for the 2020 Believer Book Award). He works as education director at Just Buffalo Literary Center and curates the Silo City Reading Series, a multimedia poetry series inside a 130-foot high abandoned grain elevator.