Hossannah Asuncion is a writer, organizer and educator who was raised near the 105 and 710 freeways in Los Angeles and currently lives near an A/C stop in Brooklyn. She is the author of Fragments of Loss (Poetry Society of America, 2010) and Object Permanence (Magic Helicopter Press, forthcoming 2016).

Aracelis Girmay holds a B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. from New York University. She is the author of three poetry collections, Teeth (Curbstone, 2007), Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), for which she won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016). In 2011 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Girmay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Jerome Foundation, the Watson Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She currently teaches poetry as an assistant professor at Hampshire College. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.

Emilia Phillips is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, Groundspeed (2016) and Signaletics (2013), and three chapbooks. Her poetry and lyric essays appear in Agni, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center, and she is the 2015 StoryQuarterly Nonfiction Prize recipient. She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary University of New Jersey.

R. A. Villanueva’s debut collection of poetry, Reliquaria (U. Nebraska Press, 2014), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. New writing appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Prac Crit (UK), and widely elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and London.