Ben Purkert is the author of FOR THE LOVE OF ENDINGS (Four Way Books, 2018). His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, AGNI, Tin House Online, Guernica, and elsewhere. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow. He teaches at Rutgers while also working as a freelance writer for branding agencies. He's served clients including AT&T, City Harvest, IBM Watson, and others. He's currently at work on a novel about branding and the artificiality of the self.
"I want this book to float out into the cosmos to reach future and existing forms of intelligence—to let them know there was at least one beautiful/difficult, dark/brilliant side to us earthlings.” — Brenda Shaughnessy
Lizzie Harris’s debut collection is Stop Wanting (CSU Poetry Center, 2014). Her poems appear in All Hollow, Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Phantom Limb, Sixth Finch and VICE.com. Harris received her MFA from New York University, where she taught creative writing and led a workshop for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was born in southern Arizona, raised in Pennsylvania and currently resides in Brooklyn, where she’s a poetry editor for Bodega Magazine.
“Stop Wanting crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.” — Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate