Hillary Gravendyk (1979–2014) was born in Los Angeles, California. She attended Tulane and the University of Washington and went on to get a doctorate in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, her chapbook The Naturalist came out from Achiote Press and in 2010, her book Harm was published by Omnidawn. In 2009, she was hired to teach twentieth-century poetry at Pomona College in Claremont, California. After moving to Oakland in 2003 with her husband Benjamin Burrill, Hillary lived out most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area and Claremont.
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Cynthia Arrieu-King lives in Philadelphia, works near Atlantic City, and spends a lot of time in Louisville, Kentucky. She edited the Asian Anglophone issue of dusie and also the last book of poems by the late Hillary Gravendyk, The Soluble Hour, due out from Omnidawn in fall 2017. Cynthia Arrieu-King was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati. A former Kundiman Fellow, Arrieu-King is the author of the poetry chapbook The Small Anything City (2006) and the full-length poetry collections People Are Tiny in Paintings of China (2010) and Manifest (2013). With Sophia Kartsonis, she coauthored the chapbook By Some Miracle a Year Lousy with Meteors (2013). She also cowrote the collection Unlikely Conditions (1913 Press, 2016) with the late Hillary Gravendyk. Arrieu-King is an assistant professor at Stockton University and has been a featured poet at the Dodge Poetry Festival.
Elena Karina Byrne, author of Squander (Omnidawn 2016), MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2008), and The Flammable Bird , (Zoo Press 2002), former 12 year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America is a multi-media artist, editor, Poetry Consultant / Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club, and one of the final judges for the Kate/Kingsley Tufts Prizes in poetry. Her book reviews and poetry publications, among others, include the Pushcart Prize XXXIII, Best American Poetry, Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Slate, Volt, Diode, Poetry International, Ploughshares, Drunken Boat, OmniVerse, Verse, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Black Renaissance Noire, and forthcoming in BOMB, Poetry, Plume, and Knopf's Every Man's Pocket Poet's Anthology, Poems about the Movies. Elena just completed a collection of essays entitled, Voyeur Hour: Meditations on Poetry, Art & Desire.
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Mirror Inside Coffin. She is the recipient of several poetry prizes; her poems and reviews have been widely published in journals such as Mantis, Rain Taxi and Your Impossible Voice. She presently lives on a tropical island in the Coral Sea.