Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of fifteen books of poetry, most recently A Treatise on Stars and Hello, the Roses, both with New Directions, as well as A Lit Cloud, a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith. She lives in New York City and northern New Mexico.

Susan Briante is the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders all from Ahsahta Press. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she also serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The program brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to work with community-based environmental and social justice groups. Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, will be published by Noemi Press in 2020.

Mike Lala is the author of Exit Theater, winner of the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry, the chapbooks Twenty-Four Exits: A Closet Drama (Present Tense Pamphlets 2016) and In the Gun Cabinet (The Atlas Review 2016), the multichannel sound installation Infinite Odyssey (Pioneer Works 2017), and the opera Oedipus in the District (National Sawdust 2018, The Tank NYC 2019). Poems appear in BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, the PEN Poetry Series, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula. www.mikelala.com

Eleni Sikelianos was born and grew up in California, and has lived in New York, Paris, Athens, and Colorado. She is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently What I Knew (Nightboat), and two hybrid memoirs (The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine). Sikelianos has been the happy recipient of many awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including two National Endowment for the Arts awards, the National Poetry Series, and Gertrude Stein Awards. Her writings have been widely anthologized and translated, with five books in French and two in Greek. She has taught poetry in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists. Since 1998, she has been on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program and for many years taught in the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, where she founded and ran the Writers in the Schools program. In 2017, she joined the Literary Arts faculty at Brown University.

Eric Keenaghan is associate professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. His work focuses primarily on modernist and Cold War poets who have much to teach us about American political life and history, often with lessons directly related to our understandings of gender and sexuality. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State University Press). Since publishing that project, poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser has played a significant part in his work, His essays on her forgotten, often unpublished, texts have appeared in the Journal of Narrative Theory, Textual Practice, and Feminist Modernist Studies. As an accompaniment for his essay in that last journal, he also recovered Rukeyser’s suppressed feminist essay “Many Keys,” from 1957. For years, he has been working on recovering some of her other lost works—plays, essays, film scripts, autofiction and other stories. Alongside a constellation of other writers ranging from Walter Lowenfels and Kenneth Patchen to John Wieners and Diane di Prima, Rukeyser also has found her way into the two critical monographs he has been developing for a long while now—one called “The Impersonal Is Political,” on activist-poets who were influenced by modernism and associated with the New Left; and the other called “Life, Love, and War,” on anarchist pacifism, antifascism, and twentieth-century American poetry.

Deborah Landau is the author of four books of poetry. She was educated at Stanford, Columbia, and Brown, where she earned her PhD. She is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, sons, and daughter.

Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut based in New York. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Paper Camera (Litmus Press, 2019). She is the recipient of a 2018 O. Henry Award, a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in BOMB, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke, Aster(ix), CURA and MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies. She has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, The Drawing Center, Art In General, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Dubai Art Projects, Hessel Museum of Art, and MAK Center for Art and Architecture. She participated in the 33rd Bienal de Sao Paulo, 2017 LIAF Biennial in Norway and the 11th Performa Biennial. She is co-editing a new series for Coffee House Press entitled Spatial Species (2021). She is a Professor in Humanities and Media Studies and Writing at the Pratt Institute.

Anthony Alves is a multidisciplinary artist. Since 1988 resides in New York City. In his formation as a Visual artist, Poet, Essayist, Play Writer, Director and Photographer. He graduated from F.I.T. and Parsons’ art School. He has been participating in various workshops Throughout New York City, B.C.A. The Cherry Lane Theater, from 2001 to these days he attends workshops at the Poetry Project. His poetry was display in the 1996 Bronx Council on the Art Anthology, named Not Black and White. In 2000 he published 3 Chap books. In 2012 He recorded a CD of Poetry with Ann Waldman and Ambrose Bye. His most recent publication “You Should Never be Afraid of Amish People Again” was published by Diaz Grey Editions at McNally Jackson Book Store. And The Bronx Memoir Project volume2. His conducting a Bilingual Creative Writing Workshop Named “Sin Final” at The Latin-American workshop in New York city.