Jen Benka is the Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets. She worked previously as the managing director of Poets & Writers and for 826 National. She is the author of Pinko and A Box of Longing With Fifty Drawers.

Carolyn Forché’s books of poetry include Blue Hour; The Angel of History, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and The Country Between Us. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness and the co-editor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University.

Kevin Young’s books of poetry include The Book of Hours; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels; Dear Darkness: Poems; For the Confederate Dead; and Jelly Roll: A Blues. He is also the editor of anthologies, including The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 and The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.