Shara McCallum is the author of seven books published in the U.S. and United Kingdom. Her most recent collection is Behold (Alice James Books and Peepal Tree Press, 2026). Recognition for her work includes a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and others. From Jamaica, of Jamaican and Venezuelan parentage, McCallum directs the creative writing program and teaches at Penn State, where she is a Sparks Professor of English.

Patrick Holian is a Mexican American writer from San Francisco, California. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, Barrelhouse, and The Cincinnati Review. He was a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, he is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and he received a creative writing fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. He also loves his dog, Conan.

Kurtiss Limbrick is an American poet, musician, and artist. They have a BA in creative writing from Arizona State University and received their MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Sue Payne is a law professor and a poet who lives in Atlanta with her husband and their two dogs. She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, but spent most of her life in Chicago. She’s working on a chapbook of new poems.

John Kinsella’s recent collections of poetry include The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2025) and Aporia: New Poems (Turtle Point Press, 2025).

Ansel Elkins was raised in Talladega County, Alabama. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Blue Yodel (Yale University Press, 2015), and her second book will be published by Ecco in 2027. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The Believer, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She won the 2026 Center for Book Arts chapbook contest. She teaches at Berea College in Kentucky.

Russell Susumu Endo has published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere—also inspiring Sumi Tonooka’s jazz orchestra piece Out from the Silence, which was performed on PBS. He received a BA from Yale University, a JD from University of Pennsylvania, and a Liberty Bell from the Philadelphia Law Department for service. He continues to serve on Quaker boards.