Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of the poetry collections Doggerel (W. W. Norton, 2025); Redaction (W. W. Norton, 2023), with visual artist Titus Kaphar; Felon (W. W. Norton, 2019), winner of a 2020 NAACP Image Award and an American Book Award; Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015); and Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), which won the 2010 Beatrice Hawley Award.

Betts is also the recipient of a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was an Emerson Fellow at New America, and is a PhD candidate at Yale Law School. He lives in New Haven.

Dean Rader

Dean Rader is an award-winning poet whose work explores identity, sustainability, art, and global change. His debut collection, Works & Days (2010), won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, while Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named a standout poetry book of the year by the Barnes & Noble Review. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, and his widely shared poem “America I Do Not Call Your Name without Hope” was published by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2016.

His most recent collection, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (2023), pairs his poems with Twombly’s artwork and was praised by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “stunning.” Rader’s achievements have been supported by fellowships from Princeton, Harvard, Art Omi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and MacDowell.

Rader was raised in Weatherford, Oklahoma. He earned a BA at Baylor University, as well as an MA and a PhD in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco, and he lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.

Kelli Russell Agodon

Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of four collections of poems, including the award-winning Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Hourglass Museum, and Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for 2010,and a Top 10 GoodReads Best Books of the Year in Poetry. Her newest poetry collection, Accidental Devotions, was just published by Copper Canyon Press. It's a book full of spirits and spirituality, desire and grief, smartphones and Emily Dickinson with poems that ask—what do we accidentally give our attention to? Kelli is the author of five books of poetry and the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press. She teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop, and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. Kelli lives in a small seaside town in Washington State, where she writes poems, paddleboards, and occasionally keeps company with the ghosts.

Jamaica Baldwin

Jamaica Baldwin (she/her) is a poet and educator originally from Santa Cruz, CA. Her first book, Bone Language, was published by YesYes Books in June 2023. Her work has appeared in Guernica, World Literature Today, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and The Missouri Review, among others. Her accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor's prize, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, as well as the San Miguel de Allende Writer's Conference Contest Poetry Award.

Jamaica has also served as a community based teaching artist with Writers in the Schools - Seattle, Louder Than a Bomb - Great Plains (an affiliate of Nebraska Writers Collective), and taught a generative writing workshop for women in Guatemala. Her writing has been supported by Aspen Words, Storyknife, Hedgebrook, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers program. Jamaica has a PhD from the University of Nebraska -Lincoln in English with a focus on poetry and Women's and Gender Studies and she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in New York.