Catherine Barnett: is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (selected by Publishers Weekly as a “Best Books 2024” and included in NPR’s “2024: Books We Love”); Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim and Civitella Ranieri fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor.
Charles Bernstein: Born in Manhattan in 1950, he is the author or editor of over 50 books, ranging from collections of poetry and essays to pamphlets, libretti, and collaborations. His newest book is The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (University of Chicago Press). He won the 2019 Bollingen Prize for Near/Miss (Chicago, 2018) and the 2025 America Award for lifetime contribution to international writing. Recent books: Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016). His work was the subject of The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, edited by Paul Bové, the Fall 2021 issue of boundary 2. The University of New Mexico Press recently published an annotated, facsimile edition of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, which he co-edited with Bruce Andrews from 1978-1981, along with a volume of related letters, and the late 1970s collaborative poem Legend. In 2004, he co-founded PennSound with Al Filreis: the site includes extensive recordings of John Ashbery. He is Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, SUNY-Buffalo and Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania as well as being a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge: Born in Beijing, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of fourteen books of poetry including Hello, the Roses, Empathy, I Love Artists and A Treatise on Stars shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her collaborations include works in theater, dance, music, and the visual arts. She is the recipient of the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 2020 and her work with composer George Lewis received a Grammy nomination in 2025. She lives in northern New Mexico.
Lucasen Brown: is a painter, independent curator and art dealer. He is former owner of Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York (1994-2017), specializing on The New York School Painters and Poets. Brown edited Tibor de Nagy Editions and exhibition catalogues including publications on John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, and painters Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher, among others. He organized the first show of Ashbery’s collages (2008) and curated “Works from the Collection of John Ashbery” at Kasmin Gallery (2018). He is a former board member of the Flow Chart Foundation, which promotes Ashbery’s legacy and encourages research on his work. As a painter, Brown’s artwork has been the subject of eight solo shows and have been included in numerous group exhibitions. He is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and was a Visiting Scholar and Artist at The American Academy in Rome. He will graduate from Yale Divinity School with a Master of Sacred Theology in May 2025.
Richard Deming: is an award-winning poet and critic, whose work explores the intersections of literature, philosophy, and visual culture. He is the author of six books, including This Exquisite Loneliness (Viking, 2023), Day for Night (Shearsman, 2016); Touch of Evil (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Art of the Ordinary (Stanford UP, 2018). He is a Senior Lecturer in English at Yale and serves as the Director of Creative Writing.
Langdon Hammer: is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale University. He studies the cultural history of poetry, and has a keen interest in poet’s lives. He is also the poetry editor of ‘American Scholar’, and has been the English Department chair at Yale University three times since joining the department in 1987. He is the author of James Merrill: Life and Art and has written about poets and poetry for the New York Times, New York Review of Books and many other magazines. Currently, Langdon is working on a critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop, and is editing several volumes of American Poetry.
Susan Howe: was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her poetry collections include: The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990). Since 1989 she has been a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is currently the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities. She was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. Susan Howe received the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry in 2011. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.
Sam Huber: is a senior editor at The Yale Review and lecturer in English at Yale. Their essays and reviews have appeared in American Literature, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. They are writing a biography of Kate Millett.
Nancy Kuhl: Curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Kuhl earned an MA in English literature from Ohio University, a MFA in poetry from Ohio State University, and an MLS from SUNY Buffalo in 2000. She is author of the collections The Wife of the Left Hand (2007) and Suspend (2010), as well as the chapbooks In the Arbor (1997), winner of the Tom Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize, and The Nocturnal Factory (2008). Her most recent work includes On Hysteria (Shearsman Books, 2022) and Granite (A Published Event, 2021). Kuhl is coeditor, with her husband, Richard Deming, of Phylum Press, which publishes pamphlets and chapbooks of poetry.
Ann Lauterbach: Poet Ann Lauterbach’s work has been compared to the poetry of John Ashbery and Barbara Guest. She has published several volumes of poetry, including Many Times, but Then (1979), Before Recollection (1987), Clamor (1991), And for Example (1994), On a Stair (1997), If in Time (2001), Hum (2005) and Or to Begin Again (2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. If in Time, a volume of her selected poetry, demonstrates the transformation of her style over three decades, an evolution described by Thomas Fink in the Boston Review: “Lauterbach has found new forms for expressing the continuousness of change: its ways of summoning and disrupting intimacy, of evoking and subverting the position of perceptions and the framing and decentering play of language itself.” Lauterbach was born in New York City, the daughter of a war correspondent for Life and Time magazines in Moscow who was also the head of the Moscow Bureau of Time during World War II. Lauterbach’s father died in 1950, when Ann was still a child; this absence and his absences while traveling would later feature in her poetry. As a child, Lauterbach studied painting and became especially interested in abstract expressionism. After receiving a BA in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1964, she attended Columbia University for one year on a Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowship. At the completion of her studies, Lauterbach moved to London, England, where she edited books and taught literature. In 1974 she returned to the United States and immersed herself in the art world, working as an art consultant and an assistant director to various art galleries. Lauterbach’s linguistically complex, senstive work has been compared to the poetry of John Ashbery and Barbara Guest.“Suffice it to say that she evidently wants us to experience her work form-first, to sense its shapes before shaping a sense,” noted critic Andrew Osborn of the poems in On a Stair. Lauterbach seems to concur with this assessment. In a Rain Taxi interview, she declared, “I’m much more interested in a more difficult kind of sense-making, and I mean difficult in the sense of complexity, and obscurity, but not willful obscurity, just the fact that there are certain things we cannot penetrate and do not know, we can’t know, we may never know.” In an essay for the Poetry Society of America, she further discussed the disjunctions in her work: “I began to give up the use of classical syntax, the logic of cause and effect, of an assumed relation between subject and object, after my sister died. The narrative as story had been ruptured once and for all; I wanted the gaps to show.” In Or to Begin Again Lauterbach continues to investigate the potential of narrative and rupture, as well as the differences between spoken and written language; taking its title from a sixteen-poem elegy, the book also contains the long poem “Alice in the Wasteland,” which uses the work of both Lewis Carroll and T.S. Eliot to explore language, reading, and consciousness. In addition to poetry, Lauterbach has published a book of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (2005). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. For over 15 years, she has taught at Bard College and co-directed the Writing Division of the MFA program. She has also taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. (From the Poetry Foundation website)
Sandra Lim: Sandra Lim’s latest book of poetry is The Curious Thing. Her previous collections include “Loveliest Grotesque” and “The Wilderness,” which Louise Glück selected as the winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Lim has received the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, Pushcart Prizes, and the Levis Reading Prize. In 2023, she was named Distinguished University Professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she teaches literature and creative writing.
Maggie Millner: is the author of Couplets, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of The Atlantic’s ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review. Maggie was the 2020–’21 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, the 2019–’20 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and the 2016–’18 Jan Gabrial Fellow at NYU, where they received their MFA. They are also the recipient of fellowships from Poets & Writers, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers, the Disquiet Literary Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
Geoffrey G. O’Brien: is the author of Experience in Groups (Wave Books, 2018), People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013), Metropole (University of California Press, 2011), Green and Gray (University of California Press, 2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (University of California Press, 2002). He teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison and lives in Berkeley, California.
Monica Ong: is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow.
Meghan O’Rourke: is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022); the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017), which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011); and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. O’Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. She began her career as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. A graduate of Yale University, O’Rourke is the editor of The Yale Review, and teaches classes on the art of editing and public writing.
Karin Roffman: is senior lecturer in Humanities and Associate Director of Public Humanities at Yale University. She published the first biography of John Ashbery, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (FSG, 2017), named one of the 100 notable books for 2017 by the New York Times and is currently finishing a full biography, a project which began when she discovered Ashbery’s juvenilia, childhood diaries and other papers while doing research in his Hudson house. A biography of the American painter Jane Freilicher will follow. In 2019, in collaboration with the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab, she created John Ashbery’s Nest, a virtual tour and website on John Ashbery’s Hudson house (see http://vr.ashberyhouse.yale.edu/). Her research has been supported by two ACLS fellowships (2011-12, 2017-18), the Howard Foundation (2011-12), an NEH summer stipend (2009) and an NEH Fellowship (2025), as well as grants from the Houghton Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the American Philosophical Society. She has published articles on writers and painters in Raritan, Modern Fiction Studies, Artforum, Rain Taxi, Yale Review, Chicago Review, Wallace Stevens Journal and others. Her first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (2010), won the University of Alabama Press’s American Literature Elizabeth Agee Manuscript Prize.
Daniel Swain: is a doctoral student in English Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale. His chapbook is called You Deserve Every Happiness, But I Deserve More.
Montana James Thomas: Montana James Thomas lives and works in NYC. He is the author of the chapbook, POMERANIAN and the full length poetry collection Concerning the Dinner. He’s the author of The Stink, a column about olfactory culture in NYC, published through Byline. He co-hosts the monthly reading series Straight Girls at KGB Bar Red Room.
Richard Thomas: is best known for his starring role as “John-Boy Walton” in the iconic television drama “The Waltons”, for which he won an Emmy Award and received multiple Golden Globe Award nominations. He is most recognizable to contemporary television audiences for his role as “Nathan Davis” in the series “Ozark”, as well as “FBI Special Agent Frank Gaad” in the series “The Americans” and his performance as “Sanford Bensinger” in the series Billions. He was also been seen recently on television in the limited series Tell Me Your Secrets and on film opposite Sandra Bullock and Viola Davis in The Unforgivable. His feature film performances include Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys, Tim Blake Nelson’s Anesthesia, and Ang Lee’s TAKING WOODSTOCK. Thomas received a Tony Award nomination for his performance in the recent Broadway revival of The Little Foxes. He has been seen in acclaimed performances on stage including The Great Society, You Can’t Take It With You, Race, Democracy, Incident At Vichy (Drama Desk Award nomination), The Stendhal Syndrome (Lucille Lortel Award nomination, Outer Critics Circle Award nomination), A Naked Girl On The Appian Way, An Enemy Of The People, Tiny Alice, The Front Page, The Fifth Of July, innumerable Shakespeare productions, and his professional debut at 7 years old in Sunrise At Campobello. He has starred in the national tours of the award-winning productions of The Humans (Elliot Norton Award) and Twelve Angry Men. Thomas starred as Atticus Finch in the national tour of To Kill A Mockingbird and recently as Mr. Webb in Broadway’s Our Town.