ANGIE ESTES is the author of six poetry books, including Enchantée (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize) and Tryst(one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize). Her many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the NEA. She has served as professor of American literature and creative writing at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and has taught creative writing at Oberlin College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Ohio State University.

PAUL MADDERN was born in Bermuda and lives in Ireland. He has a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, and has taught at the University of Leeds. He’s published four volumes of poetry, Kelpdings, The Beachcomber’s Report, Pilgrimage, and The Tipping Line, and received two Bermuda Government Literary Awards as well as awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021, he edited Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry. He owns and oper- ates The River Mill Writers Retreat in County Down.

ADRIENNE RAPHEL  is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin Press), and the poetry collections Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press) and What Was It For (Rescue Press). Her writing appears in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Raphel holds a PhD from Harvard and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; she has taught at Princeton Writing Program.

LISA KO  is the author of the nationally best-selling novel The Leavers, which was a 2017 National Book Award for Fiction finalist, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction in The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Her second novel, Memory Piece, will be published in Spring 2024 by Riverhead Books.

Judith Dupré’s books illuminate the marvelous, especially as revealed in art and architecture. Her works of illustrated nonfiction, including the bestsellers Skyscrapers, Bridges, and Churches, have been published in 14 languages. Dupré’s hands-on, experiential approach has yielded narratives that are increasingly hybrid, incorporating biography, history, visual analysis, and memoir to describe how places (and life) are experienced. She holds degrees from Brown and Yale universities, and is a three-time MacDowell fellow, Yale University fellow, and 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. At JMH, she is working on The Mother Sea, one in a trilogy of historical novels that pivot on psychologist William James, who championed clairvoyants and psychical research.

CINDY JUYOUNG OK  is this year’s winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, America’s longest-running poetry competition. Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), a debut with poems found in New England Review, Poetry London, and The Sewanee Review. A MacDowell Fellow and Kenyon Review Fellow, she teaches undergraduate creative writing. 

TOCHUKWU OKAFOR is an MFA Fiction candidate at Emerson College and holds a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. He has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the John Anson Kittredge Fund, Aspen Words, Vermont Studio Cen- ter, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (MASS MoCA), and elsewhere. He is at work on a story collection and a novel.