K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their debut collection Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions, selected by Tyehimba Jess. Short Film is a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver’s poems have appeared in Adroit, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. Iver has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University. They are the Roger F. Murray Chair in Creative Writing at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications, 2023). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness, The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi. He currently teaches at Tufts University.

Chris Crowder is from Flint, Michigan and earned his MFA at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Managing Editor for The Adroit Journal, his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Witness, the Poetry Foundation’s VS podcast, and elsewhere.

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry and winner of the Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, she has published her poems in American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, Guernica, and elsewhere. A former Stadler Fellow, Sarah has received fellowships and residencies from Tin House, the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Community of Writers and others. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and an incoming assistant professor of English at Macalester College.