Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in LARB, Lithub, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. Zeina currently resides in California.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award, and Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande Books, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University and teaches poetry in the Warren Wilson College MFA program for Writers.
Rita Banerjee is the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and has taught creative writing, pedagogy, publishing, foreign language, and literature courses at Harvard, UC Berkeley, LMU Munich, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and elsewhere. She received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University and is a recipient of the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, South Asia Initiative Grants, and Tata Grants among other awards. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto Merchants of Cool: How Female Cool Could Not Be Sold, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), and two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness. His chapbook, The Gospel According to X, was selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. His poems have circulated in publications like American Poetry Review, BOMB, The Nation, and Yale Review, and anthologies including Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics and Latino Poetry: A New Anthology. His work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award. Oliver earned his BA at the University of Iowa, and an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Studies, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, and now living along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, he is a CantoMundo fellow and teaches in the MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry: My Destination (forthcoming from Flood Editions and Carcanet Press in 2026), The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. An occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere, she lives in Philadelphia, but will be moving to San Francisco later this year.
Jennifer Grotz received her BA in French, English, and Art History from Tulane University, her MA in English and MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Still Falling, her fourth collection of poems, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2023. She is also the author of Window Left Open; The Needle, winner of the Helen C. Smith Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Nassar Prize; and Cusp, winner of the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters, both published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; as well as the limited edition letterpress chapbook Not Body, available from Urban Editions. Psalms of All My Days, her translations from the French of Patrice de La Tour du Pin, appeared from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013. The novel Rochester Knockings, translated from the French of Hubert Haddad, appeared in 2015 from Open Letter. And Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, is co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer and appeared in 2021 from World Poetry Books and received the PEN Foundation Best Book of Poetry in Translation Award. Her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and in five volumes of Best American Poetry. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and The Washington Post. She has received awards from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Camargo Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at the University of Rochester is director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
Martha Rhodes is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Thin Wall,
2017, University of Pittsburgh Press’s Pitt Poetry Series. Her work has been published
widely in anthologies and journals. She is currently at work on her New and Selected
Poems. Rhodes has taught at Emerson and Sarah Lawrence Colleges, and was a
visiting professor at the University of California at Irvine. From 2010-2018, she was the
director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and she serves on panels and
faculties at writing and publishing conferences around the country. Rhodes has been
awarded residencies at MacDowell, Millay Colony, Chesterwood, and in 2025, the T.S.
Eliot House. She is the publisher and executive editor at Four Way Books in New York
City.
Sally Keith forthcoming book of poems, Two of Everything, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. Her previous collections of poetry include River House (2015); Fact of the Matter (2012); Dwelling Song (2004); and Design, winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize in Poetry. A Guggenheim Fellow, her poetry has appeared in New York Times, New England Review, Conjunctions, and A Public Space. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at George Mason University’s MFA Program, where she also co-edits Poetry Daily.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Calvocoressi is the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 – 2023.
Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, Where the World is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second Things, Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, 2011), The Net (2014), From Nothing (2016), and Blood Labors (2018). The New York Times named Blood Labors one of the Best Poetry Books of the year for 2018. The Mansions, his trilogy of book-length poems, appeared from Four Way Books in 2023. The Mansions won the National Indie Book Award in Poetry and Gold in the Human Relations Book Award in Poetry. He is also the author of the critical studies Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America and On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence, a collection of essays. He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, The Selected Poems and Lola Ridge, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art, and To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge. The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the poetry of Paul Celan, appeared from Salmon Poetry (Ireland). Among his awards are the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, the National Indie Excellence Award in Poetry, and creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
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