Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) authored ten collections of poems and four works of nonfiction. Elegy Landscape: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime, his most recent book, was published by W. W. Norton in 2018. His many honors and awards include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Truman Capote Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. He was the founding director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Maryland, where he had been a professor of English since 1985. Middle Distance, a collection of poems he finished before his death, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2020.

Michael Collier’s most recent book, My Bishop and Other Poems (University of Chicago Press), was published in 2018. He is a professor of English at the University of Maryland and a director emeritus of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.