A. Van Jordan is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Cineaste. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Lannan Poetry Award, he received his MFA from the Program in 1998 and has been on its faculty since 2004.

Dana Levin is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Banana Palace (2016), which was a finalist for the Rilke Prize. Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011 Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Sky Burial was noted for 2011 year-end honors by The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, Coldfront, and Library Journal. Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as from the Lannan, Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she lives. Her fifth book, Now Do You Know Where You Are, will be published by Copper Canyon in Spring 2022.

Maurice Manning is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently, Railsplitter.  His first book was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and his fourth book was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize.  A Guggenheim Fellow, Manning is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Transylvania University in Lexington, KY. He lives on a small farm with his family in Kentucky.

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She earned her MA from the University of Wyoming, and her MFA at the University of Houston. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. She teaches at Colorado State University. In 2019-2020, she was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her play, based on Cowboys and East Indians has been commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts, and will be premiering in 2024.