Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast who lives and works as a nanny in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collections Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022), I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023), A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025), and The Lamb With The Talking Scroll (blush lit, 2025.) 

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. Lavender Ink/Diálogos now has more than 200 books in print. His twelfth book of poetry and magnum opus, city of god, appears from MadHat Press in 2026. His novel trilogy, Three Letters, (comprised of Q, Little A, and The Private I) was released in 2021 by Spuyten Duyvil. Essays, fiction, poem-like objects and other ephemera appear regularly in Xavier Review, Fell Swoop, Southern Review, Jacket2, among others. He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

A poet and writer of hybrid works, a MacDowell and Karolyi Foundation Fellow, and a Rona Jaffe Award recipient, Laura Mullen is the author of nine books. She has taught at Naropa, Brown, Colorado State University, and Louisiana State University—among other institutions. An artist’s book (Verge), with John David O'Brien, was published in 2017, and Jason Eckardt's setting of her poem "The Distance (This)" is available from Mode records. Black Square Editions published her translation of Véronique Pittolo's Hero, and her translation of Stéphanie Chaillou’s first book (something happens) was published by Lavender Ink / Diálogos. Her most recent collection, EtC, was published by Solid Objects in 2023. She lives in California.

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.