Poet Charles Bernstein is the winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and for lifetime achievement in American Poetry. He is the author of Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, April 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016).

Poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of 15 books of poetry. A Treatise on Stars and a new edition of her 1989 book, Empathy came out this year from New Directions. She is the 2021 recipient of the Yale Bollinger Prize for Poetry. Mei-mei lives in northern New Mexico and New York City.

Writer Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Girls That Never Die (forthcoming from One World/Random House), and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country (Make Me a World/Random House, 2021). She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland.

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.

Poet, environmental activist, and teacher Mary Norbert Kortë joined the Dominican Catholic Sisterhood in San Rafael, California at the age of 17. She earned BA and MA degrees in Latin, translating Virgil’s Georgics into iambic pentameter and studying classical texts. She left the Dominican order in 1968, and continued to publish poetry, participate in anti-war activism, and spearhead environmental protection projects—including the preservation of over 200 acres of old growth redwoods in Irmulco, where she moved in the 1970s. There, she served as Northern California Coordinator for Poets in the Schools, and taught in Coyote Valley’s reservation for the Pomo people and at Mendocino Community College. She still lives in a cabin she built herself, and writes nearly every day.

Writer Drew Pham is a queer, transgender writer of Vietnamese heritage, a child of war refugees, and an adjunct English lecturer at CUNY Brooklyn College. Previously, she served in the US Army and deployed to Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division. She has published in Blunderbuss Magazine, McSweeny’s, Slice Magazine, Foreign Policy, Time magazine, The Daily Beast, and Columbia Journal, among others. She serves as an editor at The Wrath-Bearing Tree, an online literary journal focused on themes of societal violence. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Poet, essayist, and playwright, Claudia Rankine is the author of six collections of poetry and plays, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, HELP, The White Card, Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, as well as numerous video collaborations. She is the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute. She is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rankine teaches at Yale.

Multidisciplinary artist Emilio Rojas works primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, he engages in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make known undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His research based practice is influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. He is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth.

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.