Ethel Rackin is the author of four books of poetry: “The Forever Notes” (Parlor Press, 2013); “Go On” (Parlor Press, 2016), a National Jewish Book Award finalist; “Evening” (Furniture Press, 2017); and “In Time” (Word Works Books, 2025). She is also the author of the text “Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing” (Broadview Press, 2022). Her collaborative lyric sequence, “Soledad,” written with Elizabeth Savage, was awarded the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and another collaborative sequence, “Silent e,” is included in “They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Collaborative Writing” (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). A MacDowell Fellow, she has taught at Penn State Brandywine, Haverford College, and Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of English.
Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of “Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes” (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her other books, ‘“The Octopus Game” (2015) and “The Diminishing House” (2010) were both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press and both received the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has also received honors from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.
Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, novelist, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published two dozen books. His works of poetry include “Camp Marmalade” (Nightboat, 2018); “The Pink Trance Notebooks” (Nightboat, 2015); and “Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background” (Turtle Point Press, 2012). His newest book, a novel, “My Lover, the Rabbi,” was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2026. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award. He is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.