Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including the novels Earth 7, Barn 8, and Vacation; the memoir Revolution, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; two story collections, including Wait Till You See Me Dance; and the graphic novel I, Parrot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over fifty magazines and journals, including Harper’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Capital Fellowship for Innovative Literature, and fellowships from the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Ucross residencies.

She’s a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center, the New Writers’ Project, and she also directs the Pen City Writers, the prison creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary. Originally from Chicago, she lives in Austin with the philosophy professor Matt Evans.

Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections: [insert] boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. They have also received an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.

Carmen Giménez is the executive director and publisher of Graywolf Press. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Be Recorder, a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and she served as the publisher of Noemi Press for twenty years.