Jeanine Walker manages the Writers in the Schools program at Seattle Arts & Lectures. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. She emcees Cheap Beer & Prose, awarded third place in LitBridge’s 2013 Best Reading Series contest .

Jason Koo is the author of America's Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island. An assistant professor of English at Quinnipiac University, he is also the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets.

Erin Malone is the author of two poetry collections, Hover and What Sound Does It Make. For the last several years she has worked as a teaching artist for Seattle Arts & Lectures' Writers in the Schools program, teaching poetry to elementary school students.

Emily Perez is the author of the poetry chapbook Backyard Migration Route. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Borderlands, and other journals, and she has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, Artist Trust of Washington, and Jack Straw Writers. She teaches in Denver.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony. Her writing has won a BOCAS Fiction Prize, the Boston Review Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright scholarship, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is a professor at the New School.