Khadijah Queen is the author of the poetry collections Conduit, Black Peculiar, Fearful Beloved, and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On. She was the winner of the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers for her verse play Non-Sequitur, which was staged by the theater company the Relationship in 2015. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Colorado Boulder and serves as core faculty for the Mile-High MFA program in creative writing at Regis University.

Kathy Fagan is the author of five books of poetry: The Raft, a National Poetry Series selection; Moving & St Rage, winner of the 1998 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry; The Charm; Lip; and, most recently, Sycamore. Fagan was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2017 and has received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ingram Merrill Foundation, Frost Place, and Ohio Arts Council. As director of Ohio State University’s creative writing program, she is poetry editor of the Ohio State University Press, and serves as faculty advisor to The Journal, for which she and Michelle Herman were awarded the 2004 Ohioana Award for Editorial Excellence.