Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire,which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry; and her most recent Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days. In 2016 she was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor. Among other awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Marjorie Welish is the author of The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems; Word Group; Isle of the Signatories; In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy; and So What So That — all from Coffee House Press. The papers delivered at a conference on her writing and art held at the University of Pennsylvania were published as a book in Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books). Thanks to Laurie Anderson, Welish’s first solo show of visual art took place at the Whitney Museum Art Resources Center; recently, a joint art exhibition with Olivier Gourvil took place at La Terrasse, in Nanterre, France; and still more recently, her paintings were on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational 2018. A decade ago Granary Books published Oaths? Questions?, a collaborative artists’ book by Marjorie Welish and James Siena, which was the subject of a special exhibition at the Denison University Museum, Granville, Ohio, and part of a two-year tour of artists’ books throughout the United States. At present, she is pursuing collaborative projects with artists Buzz Spector and Dan Walsh. Her honors include the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship from Brown University, the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship at Cambridge University, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Fellowship, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also held a Senior Fulbright Fellowship that has taken her to the University of Frankfurt and to the Edinburgh College of Art. She was the inaugural Madelon Leventhal Rand Distinguished Lecturer in Literature at Brooklyn College.