Gregory Donovan is author of the poetry collections Torn from the Sun and Calling His Children Home, winner of the Devins Award. He is on the faculty of the MFA in creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University and is senior editor of the online journal Blackbird.

David St. John is the author of many collections of poetry, including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for the National Book Award, and most recently, The Auroras and The Window. He is chair of the Department of English and teaches in the PhD program in literature and creative writing at USC.

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 coeditor 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 in Washington, DC.

Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of eight books of poems, four novels, two essay collections, and two edited anthologies. She is a professor of English and creative writing at USC. She is founder of USC's PhD program in creative writing/literature, and the former poet laureate of California. Her honors include a Guggenheim and NEA. She is a National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist.

Michele Poulos is an award-winning poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker. Her poetry collection Black Laurel is forthcoming, and her chapbook A Disturbance in the Air won the 2012 Slapering Hol Press contest.