Dr. Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent book is Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the Twenty-first Century (Assembly Press, 2026). Beaulieu has received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for his dedication to Albertan literature and CCWWP Robert Kroetsch Award for excellence in innovative pedagogy and teaching practice. He is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award’ and the only graduate in creative writing to receive Roehampton University’s Chancellor’s Alumni Award. Beaulieu has served as Poet Laureate of Calgary and Banff and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Dr. Nasser Hussain lives in Leeds and teaches Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett University, where he is constantly astonished by the work the students there produce. He has written reviews for Poetry London, Ambit, and the Poetry School, and has appeared on BBC’s The Verb and Free Thinking. His constraint-based book SKY WRI TEI NGS, published with Toronto’s Coach House Books in late 2018, is a collection in which every word is an IATA airport code. His second book with Coach House, love language, was released in the Autumn of 2023. His next book, The Point (forthcoming from Coach House Books) is an extended asemic visual poem suite about punctuation.

Madeline McCaffrey is an arts worker and creative currently managing all Literary Arts residency programs at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She has worked for various arts organizations, including the Association of Canadian Publishers, the Toronto International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront Centre, Campbell House Museum, and The Corporation of Massey Hall & Roy Thomson Hall along with a portfolio that features a few published works and curatorial projects. When not actively adding to her ever-growing to-be read pile, nor accidentally drinking paint water thinking it’s her 4-hour-old coffee, she can be found in the mountains finding new and creative ways to worry her mother.

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.