A.L. Nielsen’s latest book, A Brand New Beggar, is just out from Steerage Press.  Previous poetry collections include Heat Strings, Evacuation Routes, Stepping Razor, VEXT, Mixage and Mantic Semantic.  His work has appeared in Best American Poems and other anthologies, and he has won two Gertrude Stein Awards for his poetry. His books of criticism include Reading Race, Writing between the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Black Chant and Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation. His critical works have won the Josephine Miles Award, the SAMLA Studies Prize, the Kayden Award for best book in the humanities, and a Gustavus Myers Citation.  With Lauri Ramey he has edited two anthologies of innovative work by African American poets, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone and What I Say, both from the University of Alabama Press. His edition of Lorenzo Thomas’s posthumous book of criticism, Don’t Deny My Name, won an American Book Award. He is also the editor of the critical collection Reading Race in American Poetry. Nielsen is currently the George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Evie Shockley’s most recent book of poetry, the new black (Wesleyan), won the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. She is also the author of a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press), two chapbooks, and a critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa). Recipient of the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize, Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.