Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water (2023), selected by Tina Chang as winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, the Yale Review Online, and elsewhere, and she received Shenandoah's 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. Originally from Bedford County, Virginia, next to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Aylor lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech.

William Wenthe's fifth book of poems, The Gentle Art,  was published in August 2023 by LSU Press.  He has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes.  His poems and critical essays on the craft of poetry have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Tin House, Harvard Review, AGNI, Threepenny Review, and many other journals and anthologies.  He is a Professor of English at Texas Tech, where he teaches creative writing and modern poetry.