Andrea Hollander⁠, author of ⁠six poetry books⁠, moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for fifteen years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for twenty-two. Hollander’s newly released sixth full-length collection is ⁠And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books, 2023)⁠. Her fifth, Blue Mistaken for Sky, was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her fourth, Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982- 2012, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her first, House Without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and was recently reissued, along with The Other Life, Hollander’s second full-length collection, by Red Hen Press in its Story Line Legacy series. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction), two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2021 49th Parallel Award in Poetry. After teaching for two literary centers in Portland for six years, in 2017 she initiated the Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducted in her home until the pandemic, and now via Zoom.

⁠Emily Ransdell⁠'s debut collection, ⁠One Finch Singing⁠, was awarded the 2022 Lewis Award and was published in 2023 by Concrete Wolf Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Emily divides her time between Camas Washington and Manazaita Oregon, where she teaches poetry workshops through the Hoffman Center for the Arts.