Ken Chen is the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He is the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Award, the oldest annual literary award in America, for his book Juvenilia, which was selected by the poet Louise Glück. An NEA, NYFA and Bread Loaf fellow, Chen co-founded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice. A graduate of Yale Law School, he successfully defended the asylum application of an undocumented Muslim high school student from Guinea detained by Homeland Security.

Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History and Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes and A Day and Its Approximates. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree and Conjunctions. Essays on poetics, feminism, and politics have been collected in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of an anthology of new writing by Black women, Letters to the Future, forthcoming in June 2018 from Kore Press.

Sharon Mesmer is a writer of poetry, fiction and essays. Her newest poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books, 2015), was voted “Best of 2015” by Entropy. Previous poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (chapbook, ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). She is co-editor of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, just published by Edge Books. Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other places. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School, and lives in Brooklyn.

Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, most recently, The Pedestrians and MOTHERs. She was honored to write the foreword to Wait Till I’m Dead, Uncollected Poems by Allen Ginsberg. Zucker is the host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People).

Edward Sanders is a poet, historian and composer. His recently published book, illustrated by Rick Veitch, is “Broken Glory, the Final Years of Robert Kennedy,” published by Arcade Publishers. He has a degree in ancient Greek from New York University. His manifesto, “Investigative Poetry,” has inspired several book-length biographies in verse, including Chekhov, a Biogaphy in Verse, and The Poetry & Life of Allen Ginsberg. Other Sanders’ books include Tales of Beatnik Glory (4 volumes published in a single edition), 1968, a History in Verse; and The Family, a history of the Charles Manson murder group. His 1987 collection, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, won an American Book Award. His selected poems, 1986-2008, Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War, was published by Coffee House Press. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in verse, an American Book Award for his collected poems, a 2012 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Prize, and other awards for his writing. Sanders was the founder of the satiric folk/rock group, The Fugs, which has released many albums and CDs during its nearly 50-year history. His book on the Manson group, The Family, is under option to be made into a movie. Filming began in March of 2018. He lives in Woodstock, New York with his wife, the essayist and painter Miriam Sanders, and both are active in environmental and other social issues.