Chris Abani's prose includes Song for Night, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections include Sanctificum, Feed Me the Sun: Collected Long Poems, and Kalakuta Republic. He is a professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN/Beyond Margins Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. 

Alicia Ostriker's The Book of Seventy received the National Jewish Book Council Award, and The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011 received the Paterson Lifetime Achievement Award. She teaches in Drew University's low-residency MFA in poetry program. The Old Woman, the Tulip and the Dog appeared in 2014.

Afaa M. Weaver's 12th book, The Government of Nature, won the Kingsley Tufts Award for 2014. He has also received two Pushcart Prizes, an NEA grant, and a PEW fellowship. In 1993 he received the PDI Award in playwriting. A graduate of Brown, he holds the Alumnae Chair at Simmons College in Boston.

Bernardine Evaristo is an award-winning British author of Afro-diasporic fictions and verse fiction. Her latest novel is Mr Loverman, and her verse novels include the semi-autobiographical Lara and The Emperor’s Babe. Two of her seven books have recently been adapted into BBC Radio 4 dramas. She is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, and she was made an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2009. www.bevaristo.com