Tess Congo's work has appeared in Publisher's Weekly, PANK magazine, Curlew Quarterly, Luna Luna Magazine, Bowery Gothic, and the anthology Ripe (forthcoming). She's been the recipient of the Frederick Hyde Hibberd Scholarship, the Colie Hoffman Prize, and scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She earned her MFA in poetry from Hunter College. 

Emily Conner is a teacher, illustrator, writer, and mother. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Alabama State University. She lives in Portland, OR.

Nathan Erwin is a poet in love with place. With a family tree rooted in the North and South, Alabama moonshiners and Vermont dairy farmers, he grew up on Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia.

An IAF and Harvard trained organizer, Erwin currently operates at Boston Medical Center to prevent overdose deaths and at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for farmers, farmworkers, and land stewards. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about land, drugs, myths, and wanting. His writing has most recently appeared in FOLIO, Willow Springs, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Bombay Gin.  

Hannah Matheson received her MFA in poetry at New York University, where she served as poetry editor of Washington Square Review. Previously awarded scholarships to attend The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, Hannah has poems published or forthcoming in Four Way Review, The Adroit Journal, Pigeon Pages, Solar, Image Journal, Honey Lit, Best New Poets, Hobart, and elsewhere. Hannah currently works as publicist and editor at Four Way Books.

Peter Mladinic’s fourth book of poems, Knives on a Table is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications.

An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA.

Emily Neuberger is the author of the novel A TENDER THING, published by Putnam in 2020. Her writing has appeared in The Common, Joyland, The Sun, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, and lives in Brooklyn with her tuxedo cat, who is not named Mr. Mistoffelees but nevertheless is magical.

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Asheville Literary Review, Nimrod, Washington Square Review, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.

Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry, including his most recent book, The King’s Touch, from Graywolf Press in February 2022. Other works include Army Cats, winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. In addition, Far Side of the Earth won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Dreamhouse was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and The Chain was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. Station Zed was published in 2015 and includes his long poem about Iraq, “Homage to Basho,” a version of which received Poetry Magazine’s Editors Prize. In 2018 a book of prose collecting his essays on refugees in the Middle East and Africa, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In An Age Of Refugees, was published simultaneously by Graywolf Press as a companion piece to House of Fact, House of Ruin. He has also published a previous book of essays, Interview With a Ghost, and a translation of Euripides' Herakles. Widely anthologized, his poems and prose appear in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Threepenny, The Village Voice, and other literary magazines, as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others. 

He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn. During the last decade, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya.