Jennifer L. Knox's new book of poems, Days of Shame and Failure, was published by Bloof Books in late 2015. Her first three books of poems are also available on Bloof: The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon and A Gringo Like Me. Her poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series as well as the anthologies Great American Prose Poems, From Poe to Present and Best American Erotic Poems. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, McSweeney's, and Bomb. Jennifer was born in Lancaster, California—home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Space Shuttle. She received her B.A. from the University of Iowa, and her M.F.A. in poetry writing from New York University. She has taught poetry writing at Hunter College and New York University and has guest lectured in universities and colleges across the country. She currently teaches at Iowa State University and is the proprietor of a little company called Saltlickers.

photo by Esther Levine

Sharon Mesmer is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She is the author most recently of Greetings from my Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books, 2015). Her previous poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998), and Crossing Second Avenue (chapbook, ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation by Daniel Bismuth, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005), and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2005). She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and the New School. Originally from Chicago, she has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988.

Natalie Eilbert’s first book of poems, Swan Feast, has just been reissued by Bloof Books. She is the author of two chapbooks, Conversation with the Stone Wife (Bloof Books, ’14) and And I Shall Again Be Virtuous. (Big Lucks Books, ’14). Her poems and essays can be found or are forthcoming from The Kenyon Review, Tin House, West Branch, Guernica, The Fanzine, Philadelphia Review of Books, and many others. She is the founding editor of The Atlas Review. You can find more writing on her tumblr, venusofnatalie.tumblr.com.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of three books of poems: Primary Source (Red Hen Press 2016), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Prize; Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press 2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize, and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books 2004), a Stahlecker Selection. He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2015). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House. Jason has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in 2011. He is Poetry Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, and Associate Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Raised an Air Force brat, Schneiderman has lived in Germany, Maryland, California and England. He was born in San Antonio, Texas, but his family moved away shortly after his birth. His mother instilled a love of poetry early on, with tastes that ran toward Robert Service and Don McLean. At the University of Maryland, Schneiderman studied English and Russian, and spent a year abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia. He returned to the states to study poetry at NYU, where he worked with Agha Shahid Ali, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Cornelius Eady, Mark Doty, and Tom Sleigh; he received his MFA is 2001. During this time, he also assisted Phillis Levin on her landmark anthology, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He began teaching creative writing at Hofstra, before receiving a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 2004, he married Michael Broder, and the became one of the first same sex couples to legally wed in the United States. He returned to New York to work in a doctorate in Queer Theory at the Graduate Center of CUNY, receiving his PhD in 2013. His dissertation, directed by Wayne Koestenbaum, won the Paul Monette Prize. After three years of directing a Writing Center, Schneiderman joined the faculty of the Borough of Manhattan Community College as an Assistant Professor of English, where he currently teaches a wide variety of courses in literature, creative writing, and composition.

Photo credit: Star Black