Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Beauty, published in March of 2015 along with Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, her second book of essays. Other poetry collections include Come, Thief (2011); After (2006), named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times; and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Northern California Book Award. In addition to a previous book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Hirshfield has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and (twice) the California Book Award. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry. In 2012  she received the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

D. A. Powell is the author of five collections, including Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. His honors include the Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry and an Arts & Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Critic Stephen Burt, writing in the New York Times, said of Powell, “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.”  A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, Powell has taught at University of San Francisco, Columbia University, University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Davidson College. He lives in San Francisco. In fall of 2014 Graywolf released Repast: Tea, Lunch & Cocktails, a reissue of Powell’s first three collections, with an introduction by novelist David Leavitt.

Arthur Sze is the author of nine books of poetry, including Compass Rose (2014),The Ginkgo Light (2009),  Quipu (2005) and The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998). He is also a celebrated translator from the Chinese, and released The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese in 2001. About his work, Jackson Mac Low has said, “The word ‘compassion’ is much overused—‘clarity’ less so—but Arthur Sze is truly a poet of clarity and compassion.” His honors include an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. In 2013, he was awarded the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers magazine. Sze was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012, and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.  She the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.  Her first book, Granted, won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.   She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.

Robert Boswell has published seven novels, three story collections, and two books of nonfiction, and has had two plays produced. The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Award in Fiction. What Men Call Treasure was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Nonfiction Spur Award. Virtual Death was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named by the Science Fiction Chronicle as one of the best novels of the year. Boswell has published more than 70 stories and essays in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Ploughshares, and many other magazines and anthologies. Boswell’s work has earned him two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, and the PEN West Award for Fiction, among others. He teaches at the University of Houston, where he holds the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing. He also teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of three books:  the critically acclaimed novella All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, the novel Inheritance,  and Hunger: A Novella and Stories. Chang has been honored as the California Book Award Silver Medalist, as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and with a Bay Area Book Award and literary awards from the Greensboro Review and the Transatlantic Review. Her work has also been nominated for the PEN Center USA West Award and the PEN/Hemingway Literature Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Chang currently serves as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Michelle Huneven is the author of four novels. Her first three — Round Rock (1997), Jamesland (2003), and Blame (2009) — were all finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Round Rock and Jamesland were both New York Times notable books of the year, and Blame was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Off Course, published in 2014, has received strong acclaim, with the New Yorker calling it “full of surprises … Huneven’s touch is sure, and her protagonist is simultaneously sympathetic and maddening.” Huneven has received the GE Younger Writers Award and a Whiting Award for Fiction. She has reviewed restaurants and written about food for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly and other publications, and received a James Beard award and an assortment of other honors for food journalism. Huneven teaches creative writing to undergraduates at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound (2010), and seven short story collections, including Funny Once (2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 2009 and the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.  She lives in Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston, Texas.