Jeannine Marie Pitas is the author of three poetry chapbooks and the translator of several Uruguayan poets, including Marosa di Giorgio. Her first full-length poetry collection, Things Seen and Unseen, was published by Mosaic Press in 2019. She lives in Iowa and teaches at the University of Dubuque.

Rachel Galvin, poet, translator, and scholar, was the final reader in the spring 2019 Saint Vincent College Visiting Writers Series. She is an associate professor at the University of Chicago and a co-founder of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective (www.outranspo.com).

Abigail Chabitnoy is a poet of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She received her MFA at Colorado State University, where she was an associate editor for the Colorado Review. Her first full length book of poetry, How to Dress a Fish was published in February of 2019 by Wesleyan University Press.

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, three poetry collections, and three poetry chapbooks. She has also co-edited a fiction anthology and is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.

Kevin Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of six collections of poetry including The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). 

His poetry has appeared in many anthologies, and his poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Poetry and Ploughshares, among others. He also has a novel entitled Summer Shares (out from Arche Books).

Joy Katz, a poet and writer, studied at Ohio State, Washington University in St. Louis, and Stanford. Katz worked as a graphic designer before beginning to write poems. She teaches in Carlow University’s ongoing Madwomen in the Attic workshops for women and serves as a thesis advisor in Chatham University’s MFA program. She is also an editor-at-large for Copper Nickel. In 2015, Katz co-founded the activist art collective Ifyoureallyloveme with theater director and humanitarian activist Cynthia Croot. Artists in the group use word, music, and performance, combined with pro-beauty and anti-racist strategies, to make art in Pittsburgh and other cities. Katz participated in choosing the winners of the Ragan Poetry Contest at Saint Vincent College in 2011.

Khet Mar, a native of Burma, was born in 1969. She is a journalist, novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Author of one novel, Wild Snowy Night, as well as several collections of short stories, essays and poems, her work has been translated into English and Japanese, been broadcast on radio and made into a film. In the fall of 2007, Mar was a visiting fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and she is currently in residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, which provides sanctuary to writers exiled under threat of death, imprisonment or persecution in their native countries (Pen World Voices).

A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Sarah O’Brien grew up on a small farm in Ohio and has lived in Cape Town, Paris and various places in the United States. She is the translator of Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Heliotropes, and her book Catch Light was selected by David Shapiro for the National Poetry Series. But not only is she a writer, she is also a fabulous cook and photographer.

José Kozer is the preeminent Cuban poet of his generation and one of the most influential poets in Latin America, where his name is a household word among readers of poetry. He has published 51 books of poetry and two books of prose, and his work has been published in Mexico, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Chile. Dozens of articles and several books have been written about his work. He has been translated into English, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, Italian and French. Kozer was the first living Cuban Diaspora poet to have a book published in Cuba.