Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of Tanya (Knopf, forthcoming March 2023); The Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019); So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press 2012), a finalist for the Griffin International Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize; Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Shaughnessy has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Guggenheim, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She currently teaches at Rutgers University–Newark.

Photo credit: Janea Wiedmann

Jenny Xie

Jenny Xie is the author of The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2018 Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She is also the author of the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017), and the winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Creative Promise. Xie currently teaches at Bard College.

Photo credit: Blue Flower Arts

Kweku Abimbola

Kweku Abimbola is the author of the full-length collection Saltwater Demands a Psalm (Graywolf Press, forthcoming April 2023), which was selected by Tyehimba Jess to receive the 2022 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Abimbola is a finalist for the 2021 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the second-place winner of the Furious Flower 2020 poetry contest. He lives in Detroit and is a teaching artist at InsideOut Literary Arts.