Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping which won the 2014 New Issues Poetry Prize and teaches at Towson University. His poems and art criticism have appeared n Gargoyle, A Gathering of Tribes, New Contrast (South Africa), The Atlantic, and the anthology, Full Moon on K Street, among other publications. He has received grants, awards, and fellowships from The DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities, American University, and the Mt. Vernon Poetry Festival at George Washington University. He is a member of the board of directors of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Ali was also an organizer for the second Split This Rock festival.

Patricia Spears Jones is author of three collections, most recently Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press); four chapbooks including Living in the Love Economy (Overpass Books, 2014), and two plays commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines. Her new collection: A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems is due out from White Pine Press, Fall 2015. Poems are anthologized in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (W.W. Norton); broken land: Poems of Brooklyn ((NYU Press) and Best American Poetry: 2000. (Scribners) and the bilingual anthology, Mujeres a los remos/Women rowing: An Anthology of Contemporary US Women Poets (El Collegio de Puebla, Mexico). She is a Lecturer at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York.