Sarah Bates lives in Marquette, Michigan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Colorado Review, Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction, and Hotel Amerika, among others. She was the winner of the 2016 Washington Square Review Poetry Award. Her poem “When a Guy at the Bar Tells Me I Sound Damaged” appeared in Rattle’s Poets Respond series this January.
Truth Thomas is a singer-songwriter and poet born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Washington, D.C. He is the Capitol Records recording artist formerly known as Glenn Edward Thomas and studied creative writing at Howard University. He earned his MFA in poetry at New England College and his collections of poetry include: Speak Water, winner of the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry; Bottle of Life, a finalist for the People’s Book Prize in London; A Day of Presence; and Party of Black. He is the founder of Cherry Castle Publishing, creator of the Skinny poetry form, a former writer-in-residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo), editor-in-chief of The Skinny Poetry Journal, and serves on the editorial board of the Tidal Basin Review. One of his poems, “Boardwalk Empire,” appears in Rattle #55 this spring.