Bangladeshi American poet Tarfia Faizullah grew up in Midland, Texas. She earned an MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University program in creative writing. Her first book, Seam (2014), won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Focused around a long sequence “Interview with a Birangona,” the book explores the ethics of interviewing as well as the history of the birangona, Bangladeshi women raped by Pakistani soldiers during the Liberation War of 1971. Faizullah received a Fulbright award to travel to Bangladesh and interview the birangona. Her latest collection is Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018).
Susan Brind Morrow was born in Geneva, New York and attended Barnard College and Columbia University, where she studied Classics, Arabic and Egyptology, and Boston University, where she was a doctoral student of Elie Wiesel's in Comparative Religion. She is the author of The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, a finalist for the Pen Martha Albrand Award for the Memoir in 1998, Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World, and The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts (2015), a collection of her translation and commentary.
Carol Muske- Dukes is a professor at the University of Southern California and a former Poet Laureate of California. She is an author of eight books of poems, most recently Blue Rose (Penguin, April 2018). Earlier books of poems include Sparrow, from Random House, a National Book Award finalist, and others. She has also published four novels, including Channeling Mark Twain. She is also an essayist and anthology editor.