Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His ninth book of poems,Irreverent Litanies,was published by Regal House. His previous collections include Talking with the Radio (Kattywompus Press) and The Number Before Infinity (Scarlet Tanager Books). His most recent play, Colette Uncensored, had its first staged reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and ran in London, Catalonia, San Francisco, and Portland. His translations of French literature include two books by Colette, Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems, and the novel Green Wheat; as well as works by André Breton, George Sand, and Marcel Pagnol. Rogow’s blog, Advice for Writers, features more than 250 posts. He has received the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award in Translation, and the Celestine Award for Poetry. He serves as poetry editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.

Dr. Herman Beavers is the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1989. He teaches courses in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature and Poetry Writing. He is the author of two scholarly monographs, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James A. McPherson (1995) and Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2018). His poems have appeared in numerous journals including, The Langston Hughes Colloquy, The American Arts Quarterly, The Painted Bride Quarterly, and Black American Literature Forum, among others. His  work is anthologized in Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty- First Century, Who Speaks for America, Show Us Your Papers, and Gathering Darkness: A Cave Canem Reader. He is the author of three chapbooks, A Neighborhood of Feeling, Obsidian Blues, and The Vernell Poems. He is completing a full-length volume of poems, Even in Such Light.

Anna Badkhen is the author of seven books, most recently Bright Unbearable Reality, longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. Essays in New York Review of Books, Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Emergence, the New York Times. Fiction in AGNI, Zyzzyva, Conjunctions, The Common, Scalawag. Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union and is a US citizen.

Ken Kalfus is the author of three novels, Equilateral (2013), The Commissariat of Enlightenment (2003) and A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and appeared in French as Un désordre américain. He has also published three collections of stories, including Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories, whose title story was published in French by Bloomsbury. Ken has received a Pew Fellowships in the Arts award and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has written for Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. A film adaptation of his short story, “Pu-239,” aired on HBO in 2007.

Laurence Nobécourt was born in Paris in 1968 where she began writing as a child. Her first book, La Démangeaison, was published in 1994 under the name Lorette Nobécourt. She has since published novels, stories, poetry and theater, first under the name of Lorette Nobécourt and then, since 2016, under her real identity. She left Paris in 2007 for the Drôme where she transmits – through her writing workshops – the Way of the Word which she conceived as an initiatory relationship to writing