Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania, and emigrated to the United States in 1966. A longtime commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered, he is the founder of Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas and the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including The Disappearance of the Outside: a Manifesto for Escape.

Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. Author of 17 collections of poetry, she has been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors. As a critic she is the author of the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible, most recently For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. Her most recent collections of poems are Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019. Her poems have been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. She is currently the New York State Poet Laureate and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

John Godfrey was born in Massena, N.Y. in 1945. He is the author of 14 collections of poetry, including The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014 (Wave Books, May 2016). He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1967, and took a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia University in 1994. He has received fellowships from the General Electric Foundation (1984), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2009), and the Z Foundation (2013), and was winner of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for 2009.. He retired in 2011 after 17 years as a nurse clinician in HIV/AIDS. He has lived in the East Village of Manhattan since the 1960s.

Sharon Mesmer’s most recent poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Place (Bloof Books) was one of Entropy’s “Best of 2015.” Her other collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose, 2008), and Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998). Four poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition). She is co-editor of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Edge Books, 2017) and has published three collections of short fiction, including Ma Vie á Yonago (Hachette, 2005). Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches literature and creative writing at NYU and the New School.

Elinor Nauen’s books include CARS & Other Poems, American Guys, So Late into the Night, Now That I Know Where I’m Going, My Marriage A to Z, and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on cars & the road and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women writers on baseball. She has been published in many magazines & anthologies. She has edited books by Senator George Mitchell, Paul Krassner and Danny Schechter, among others, and edited and written for many magazines. She lives in NYC with a cat (Lefty) and a husband (Johnny Stanton), studies Norwegian, and trains in karate.

Poet, curator, professor, performer, cultural activist Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa Institute. She was arrested at Rocky Flats with Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg in the 1970s, reading poems that challenged deliveries of plutonium for nuclear warheads. Author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press) which won the Pen Center Literary Prize. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Trickster Feminism among several others. Her album SCIAMACHY was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and the Levy-Gorvy Gallery. NEW WEATHERS, Poetics from the Naropa Archive , Nightboat 2022 has just gone to press.