Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are a storyteller whose interdisciplinary art comes to life through their love of high-camp ballads, meticulous vintage costuming, and DIY lyric supertitles. Wo’s poetry and performance evoke an operatic sense of play that brings together the high emotions of childhood, queer identity, memory, (un)documentation, and migration. Their chaplet ORDER THE WORLD, MOM was published by Belladonna* in 2016. Wo’s poems also appear in Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and are anthologized in Vinegar & Char (University of Georgia Press), Go Home! (Feminist Press), and Bettering American Poetry (Bettering Books). As a standing member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. They are a regular guest on Sasha Velour’s Nightgowns and have performed in operas, music videos, cabarets, and short films. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in New York where they teach poetry workshops and perform drag shows for queer and POC communities. They hold an MFA in Poetry from NYU.

Hannah Brooks-Motl is the author of the chapbook The Montaigne Result (Song Cave, 2013) and the full-length collections The New Years (Rescue Press, 2014) and M (Song Cave, 2015). Recent work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, and Prelude. She lives in Chicago and western Massachusetts.

Paul Vangelisti is the author of some twenty books of poetry, as well as being a noted translator from Italian. His most recent books include Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing, an older man’s not-so-divine comedy, and a book of poems, Two. In 2016 a new book of poems, Border Music, is forthcoming from Talisman House. In 2006, Lucia Re’s and his translation of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations won both the Premio Flaiano in Italy and the PEN-USA Award for Translation. In 2010, his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961-1992 won an Academy of American Poets Prize. From 1971-1982 he was co-editor, with John McBride, of the literary magazine Invisible City and, from 1993-2002, edited Ribot, the annual report of the College of Neglected Science. He worked as a journalist at the Hollywood Reporter (1972-1974), and as Cultural Affairs Director at KPFK Radio (1974-1982). Vangelisti was Founding Chair of the Graduate Writing program at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles, and is currently a professor in that program.

John Keene‘s recent books include the story collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), and several books of poetry. He also has translated the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books, 2014). His recent honors include an American Book Award and Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, as well as a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He chairs the department of African American and African Studies, and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark.

Charles Bernstein‘s most recent book of poems is Recalculating (Chicago, 2013). He teaches  at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound. In 1984, he curated the first talk series at the Poetry Project. In 2015 Bernstein was awarded both the Münster Prize for International Poetry and Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein

Ron Padgett grew up in Tulsa and has lived mostly in New York City since 1960. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, and his Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the best poetry book of 2013. In addition to being a poet, he is also the translator of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars. His own work has been translated into eighteen languages. His new book is Big Cabin (July 2019), written over three seasons in a Vermont cabin, these poems act as a reflecting pool, casting back mortality, consciousness, and time in new, crystal-clear light.