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. 

Tim Z. Hernandez is an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist, author and performer. His debut collection of poetry, Skin Tax, received the American Book Award, and his debut novel, Breathing, In Dust, received the 2010 Premio Aztlan Prize. His second collection of poetry, Natural Takeover of Small Things, received the 2014 Colorado Book Award, and his novel, Mañana Means Heaven, received the 2014 International Latino Book Award in historical fiction. His latest prose book, All They Will Call You, is a genre-bending work of nonfiction based on the song by Woody Guthrie, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” This book is the first installment of the plane crash series, a project that Hernandez considers his life's work. He recently completed the second book in the series and is currently seeking a publisher for it. As featured in People Magazine, his latest collection of poetry, Some of the Light: New & Selected Poems, was released recently with Beacon Press.

Additionally, his work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, C-SPAN, NPR's Latino USA, All Things Considered and Alt Latino.

Hernandez holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College in Vermont, and a B.A. in Writing & Literature from Naropa University, the first accredited Buddhist University in the United States. He is currently an Associate Professor in the University of Texas--El Paso's Bilinguial MFA in Creative Writing Program, and he lives in El Paso, Texas, with his two children. 

Sarah Viren received her MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa's nonfiction program and her PhD in nonfiction writing from Texas Tech University. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of two books of narrative nonfiction. Her essay collection Mine won the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Prize and the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, was a silver winner for essays in Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, was longlisted for the Pen Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award (as well as being named one of LitHub's favorite books of 2018). Her second book, To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories, was released in June 2023 from Scribner. Sarah is a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship as well as a Fulbright Student Grant to Colombia. She teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University and lives in Tempe with her partner, two kids, and rescue dog Oki.