Kurt Heinzelman has been publishing poetry for thirty years in such journals as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, Marlboro Review, and Southwest Review. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and selected for the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award. His first poetry collection The Halfway Tree was a finalist for the 2001 Natalie Ornish Poetry Award of the Texas Institute of Letters, and his second collection Black Butterflies was also an Ornish finalist in 2005. Executive Curator at the Harry Ransom Center, he also teaches English Literature courses and is widely published in literary criticism and cultural history.

Judith Kroll is the author of two collections—Our Elephant and That Child and In the Temperate Zone—and has published poems in Poetry, The New Yorker, and Southern Review, and a critical book on Sylvia Plath. Her creative nonfiction has been published in journals including Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, and River City. Recipient of two NEA fellowships in poetry, Kroll has been awarded other grants for creative nonfiction and for translating South Indian mystical poems.

A. Van Jordan, born in Akron, Ohio, received his MFA from the Warren Wilson College. He is the author of three volumes of poetry: Rise (2001), which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a selection of the Academy of American Poets book club; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2004), a cycle of poems that imagine the life of MacNolia Cox, the first black finalist in the National Spelling Bee Competition in 1936; and Quantum Lyrics, published by W. W. Norton in July 2007. His work has recently been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2007-2008. He previously taught at UNC-Greensboro and Warren Wilson College.

David Wevill (Emeritus) is the author of numerous books of poetry—among them Child Eating Snow, Figures of Eight, Other Names for the Heart—a translation of selected poems of Ferencz Jubasz, and Solo with Grazing Deer. He has received the E.C. Gregory Award, Arts Council of Great Britain awards, the Richard Hillary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent collection is entitled Asterisks.

Thomas Whitbread's books include the collections Whomp and Moonshiver, Four Infinitives, and The Structures Minds Erect. His poems have also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Massachusetts Review, and The New Yorker, and his short stories in The Paris Review, Shenandoah, and The Texas Observer.