David Baker is a poet, critic, and editor whose recent books include Scavenger Loop (poems, forthcoming), Show Me Your Environment (essays), and Never-Ending Birds, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is Poetry Editor of the Kenyon Review and teaches at Denison University.

Carl Phillips is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Reconnaissance, forthcoming in the fall of 2015. Graywolf published his book of essays, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

Stanley Plumly's most recent collection of poems is Orphan Hours. He is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye, as well as the poetry collections Once and Halflife. She was awarded a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Radcliffe Fellowship, among other prizes. She teaches at Princeton and New York University.