Philip Metres is the author of a number of books, including Sand Opera (2015), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015), A Concordance of Leaves (2013), To See the Earth (2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007). His work has garnered two NEA fellowships, five Ohio Arts Council Grants, the George W. Hunt, S.J. Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. He is professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

Lauren Shapiro holds degrees from Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry, as well as a chapbook of poems, Yo-Yo Logic (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2011). With Kevin González, she co-edited The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry  (Rescue Press, 2013).  She has translated creative work from Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese, and Arabic into English and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University.