Oli Hazzard's first book, Between Two Windows, was published by Carcanet in 2012, won the Michael Murphy Prize for a first collection and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was book of the year in the Financial Times, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. A pamphlet of prose poems, Within Habit, was published by Test Centre earlier this year. He is currently a DPhil student at Wolfson College, Oxford, where he's writing his thesis on John Ashbery.

Simone Kearney is a poet and visual artist. Her writing has appeared in Boston Review, Stonecutter, Bridge Journal, Belladonna Chaplet Series, Ragazine, Post Road, Maggy, and Supermachine, among others. Her poetry chapbook In Threes was published by MinuteBooks in 2013. Her chapbook Days is forthcoming from Monk Books. She attends Maryland Institute College of Art and lives in Baltimore.

Rickey Laurentiis is the recipient of 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He has also received fellowships and scholarships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, as well as the Alonzo Davis Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship from Washington University in St Louis where he received his MFA. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, Fence, Indiana Review, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, Oxford American and Poetry, and have been commissioned by The International Art Exhibition, Prospect.3 New Orleans. His first book of poems was selected by Terrance Hayes as the winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Idra Novey is the author most recently of Clarice: The Visitor,  a collection of poems and images in collaboration with Erica Baum.  Her debut novel Ways to Disappear is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2016.  Earlier poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, and The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry.  Her most recent translation is Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. 

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1949, was educated in catholic schools, graduated from U. Mass. (Boston) in 1971 and moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. She quickly became part of the reading, publishing and performance scene in the East Village, editing dodgems in the late 70s and becoming part of the community of St. Mark’s Poetry Project where she studied and was friends with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Paul Violi and Bill Zavatsky. In 1979 she was assistant to poet James Schuyler. She was Artistic Director of the Poetry Project in 1984-86. Myles is a vivid interpreter of her own work and travels widely in the US and Canada and internationally giving readings and performances. She is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including, Snowflake/different streets (Wave Books, 2012), Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007),Chelsea Girls, Not Me, Skies, The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading, Cool for You, and The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, and Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) published by OR books and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She wrote the libretti for Hell, an opera with music composed by Michael Webster which was performed on both coasts, 2004-2006. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital art writers’ grant, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She contributes to a wide number of publications including ArtForum, Bookforum, Parkett, and The Believer. She’s a Prof. Emeritus at UC San Diego where she taught for five years. She lives in New York.

Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead(CSU Poetry Center, 2013) and the recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Recent work has appeared (or will appear) in The Best American Poetry, Poetry, Guernica, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, and teaches writing at CUNY.