Karen Schubert is a founding director of Lit Youngstown. Her publications include four chapbooks and work in Water~Stone Review, diode, AGNI online, Best American Poetry blog, and American Literary Review. She is recipient of awards from the Ohio Arts Council and Headlands Center for the Arts.

Kelli Jo Ford's fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among others. She's been a Dobie Paisano Fellow, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient, and SAR's Indigenous Writer in Residence. She's a member of the Cherokee Nation.

Janine Harrison, MA, MFA, poet and prose writer, teaches creative writing at Purdue University Northwest. She is a former president of the Indiana Writers' Consortium, which she helped to found. Her work has appeared in the Wabash Watershed's "Six Indiana Women Poets" feature and elsewhere.

Lee Chilcote is a poet, journalist, and nonfiction writer. He is founder and executive director of Literary Cleveland.

David Hassler is director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. His poetry collection, Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, was awarded Ohio Poet of the Year 2006. His nonfiction works include the play, May 4th Voices, based on the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project and Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community.