Desirée Alvarez is a painter and poet whose work speaks to a mythic human interaction with the natural world. Her work has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Willard L. Metcalf Award, three Artist Fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, and a European Capital of Culture Award. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets House, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, and P.S. 122. Her second book, Raft of Flame, was awarded the Omnidawn 2019 Lake Merritt Poetry Book Prize. Her first book of poems won the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, Fence, and The Iowa Review. She received the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award from Denver Quarterly. She teaches at CUNY and The Juilliard School.

Stefania Heim is a poet, scholar, translator, editor, and educator. She is author of the poetry collections HOUR BOOK, chosen by Jennifer Moxley as winner of the Sawtooth Prize and published in 2019 by Ahsahta Books and A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books, 2014). Geometry of Shadows, her book of translations of metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems, will be published in October 2019 by A Public Space Books. Stefania is the recipient of a 2019 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her work on Giorgio de Chirico. Stefania’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Aufgabe, Hambone, Harvard Review, Jacket2, The Literary Review, The Paris Review, Metaphysical Art and other venues. Her article on Muriel Rukeyser’s experimental feminine poetics of war was recently published in the Textual PracticeSpecial Issue on The Life of Poetry. “Essay in Fragments, A Pile of Limbs: Walt Whitman’s Body in the Book” is forthcoming in 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive, edited by Kristen Case and Alexandra Manglis (Milkweed Editions). Stefania is a former poetry editor at Boston Review, a founding editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation, and an Editor at Large with the CUNY Lost & Found Documents Initiative. Beginning in fall 2019, Stefania will be an Assistant Professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham WA. She has taught courses in literature, the humanities, creative writing, academic writing, and translation at institutions including Bennington College, the Arete Project, Columbia University, Deep Springs College, the Thompson Writing Program of Duke University, and Hunter College. In 2016 she was the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet at the University of Montana. Stefania was raised in Queens, NY. She received an AB, magna cum laude, in Literature from Harvard University, an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, where her dissertation, Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, and the Scholar’s Art received the Alumni and Doctoral Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation in 2015.