Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of five books of poems, most recently Girl after Girl after Girl (LSU Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in in Boston Review, Narrative and Tupelo Quarterly, and her non-fiction has been published in The Atlantic, The Rumpus and The Feminist Wire. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-CUNY.

Miranda Field is the author of Swallow (Houghton-Mifflin), which won a Katherine Bakeless Literary Publication Award in 2002, and the newly-released IMAGINARY ROYALTY from Four Way Books. Born and raised in London, England, and a resident for the past several decades on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she teaches in the undergraduate writing programs at New York University, and Barnard College.

Matthew Thorburn’s latest book is Dear Almost: A Poem. He is also the author of five previous collections of poems, including This Time Tomorrow and the chapbook A Green River in Spring. His interviews with writers appear regularly on the Ploughshares website. He lives in the Bronx with his wife and son and works in corporate communications in Manhattan.