Originally from Baguio, Luisa A. Igloria was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22). The Academy of American Poets awarded her one of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, in support of public poetry projects. She is one of 2 Co-Winners of the 2019 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, fall 2020). In April 2021, the Writers Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) conferred on her the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas lifetime achievement award (English poetry category). In 2015, she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey selected her chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask as the 2018 recipient of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize. Other works include The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), and 12 other books. Her poems are widely published or appearing in national and international anthologies, print and online literary journals including Orion, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Diode, Missouri Review, Rattle, Poetry East, Your Impossible Voice, Poetry, Shanghai Literary Review, Cha, Hotel Amerika, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. Luisa served as the inaugural Glasgow Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University in 2018. With over 40 years of experience teaching literature and creative writing, Luisa also leads workshops at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk (and serves on the Muse Board). She is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor and University Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015. For over eleven years, she's been writing (at least) a poem a day. www.luisaigloria.com

John McManus is the author of three short story collections-Fox Tooth Heart, Born on a Train, and Stop Breakin Down-and the novel Bitter Milk. His work has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, the Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award, and a Creative Capital Literature grant.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I've Taken My Body (Persea Books, 2020), which was named one of Kirkus' best nonfiction titles of 2020, and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevision, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020). The recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine, her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, The New York Times, The Guardian and elsewhere.

Kent Wascom is the author of three novels--The Blood of Heaven (2013), Secessia (2015), and The New Inheritors (2018). He has been called "one of the most exhilarating historical novelists in the country" by the Washington Post. His work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, The Believer, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2012 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival prize for fiction.