Heather Derr-Smith was born in Dallas, Texas in 1971. She spent most of her childhood in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She earned her BA in Art History at the University of Virginia where she also took poetry workshops with Rita Dove, Charles Wright, and Greg Orr. She went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of three books of poetry, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), and Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016).
Amy Woolard is a writer and public policy attorney working on foster care, juvenile justice, poverty, and homelessness issues in Virginia. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Court Green, Fence, Indiana Review, and Best New Poets 2013, among others, while her essays have run on Slate, Pacific Standard, The Rumpus, Indiewire, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.