Born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the author of twelve books of poetry. Her honors include the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lamont Poetry Selection. The Father (1992) was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The Unswept Room (2002) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Her most recent collection, Arias, was published by Knopf in October 2019. She lives in NYC.

Author of 2019 National Book Awards Finalist I: New & Selected Poems, The Undertaker’s Daughter, and four earlier collections of poetry. Her honors include, among others, the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists. Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, Derricotte co-founded Cave Canem Foundation (with Cornelius Eady); served on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors, and currently serves on Cave Canem’s Board of Directors, Marsh Hawk Press’s Artistic Advisory Board, and the Advisory Board of Alice James Books.

Poet Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999; Talking Dirty to the Gods, Thieves of Paradise, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, among others. His prose is collected in Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries. He co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology and co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu. His honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Université Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Homie, Don’t Call Us Dead, and [insert] boy. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez’s work has been featured widely including on Buzzfeed, the New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez has been featured as part of Forbes’ annual 30 Under 30 list and is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. They are a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. She currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.