Jennifer Franklin (AB Brown, MFA Columbia) is the author of two full-length collections, Looming (Elixir 2015) and No Small Gift (Four Way Books 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Nation, Paris Review,“poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She has taught ekphrastic poetry at Bowery Poetry Club and she teaches year-long classes on manuscript compilation and deep revision at Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, where she serves as Program Director and curates the reading series. She lives in New York City.

Iain Haley Pollock's second collection of poems, Ghost, Like a Place, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in September 2018. His debut collection, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Pollock teaches English at Rye Country Day School in Rye, NY, and is a member of the poetry faculty at the Solstice MFA program of Pine Manor College. He also serves as a poetry co-editor at Solstice Literary Magazine.

Mervyn Taylor is a Trinidad-born poet who also works in visual art. He has taught at the New School and in the New York City public school system and is the author of six books of poetry, including No Back Door (2010), which received the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, The Waving Gallery (2014) and, most recently, Voices Carry (2017), all from Shearsman Books. He can be heard on an audio collection, Road Clear (2004), accompanied by bassist David Williams. 

After living and working in Brooklyn for nearly four decades as a poet, journalist/editor and artist, Dawad Philip has since resettled in his hometown of San Fernando, Trinidad. The author of Invocations(1980), and A Mural by The Sea (2017), Philip’s poems have appeared in several anthologies including Steppingstones, Bomb, Caribbean Voices and most recently, past simple. The poem “Memories of the Chalkstone Years” first appeared in Bomb; “Om”, “Quarter Moon” and “After-work at Our Place” appeared in Poetry International (7/8 2003-2004); “Sando Proper” appeared in Voicing Our Vision Vol. 1 and “New World Language” New Rain, Vol, 10. A 1990 recipient of New York State Fellowship on the Arts (Poetry), Philip was one of five poets selected to represent Brooklyn in a Brooklyn-Leningrad Literary Exchange in the 1990s. He has performed his works in the Caribbean, U.S., Canada, Riga, Latvia, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and selected poems have been translated into Russian by the former Leningrad Writers Union. Philip, who holds a Masters of Arts (Carnival Arts) degree from the University of Trinidad and Tobago, keeps an active hand in the annual Trinidad Carnival and further afield as a costume designer and producer. He is working on a new collection of poems, City Twilight to be published in 2019.