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.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of three collections of poetry, Dissolve, Flood Song, and Shapeshift. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and the PEN Book Award. His poems have appeared in Narrative, Black Renaissance Noir, American Poet, The Iowa Review, LIT, and elsewhere. He is Diné of the Todí­ch’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizí­laaní­ (Many Goats Clan), and has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Native Arts & Culture Foundation.

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.

Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer—has published 20 books, including Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His first book of short fiction, The Cheerful Scapegoat, will be published by Semiotext[e] in April 2021. This year he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His literary archive is in the Yale Collection of American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Julie Ezelle Patton is a New York City based poet and visual artist. She is also the founder of an eco-arts housing and land conservation project based near Detroit. Patton is the author of Using Blue To Get Black, Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake, and A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?). Julie’s work has appeared in ((eco (lang)(uage(reader)), Critiphoria, and nocturnes. Her performance work emphasizes improvisation, collaboration, and other worldy chora-graphs. Julie is a recipient of an Acadia Arts Foundation Grant (2008, 2010), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship (2007). Julie has taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art, Naropa, Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Schule fur Dichtung (Vienna, Austria).

Patrick Pethybridge is a young experimental poet living in Denver, Colorado. He is the founding editor of Visible Binary, a small literary magazine for poetry, short text, digital media, and other genres.