Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2004 Whiting Writers’ Award, the 2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in spring 2004 by Alice James Books. Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Washington Post, Barrow Street, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and The Iowa Review.

Born in New York City David Lehman was educated at Columbia University and spent two years in England as a Kellett Fellow at Cambridge University. He received his MA in 1972 (Cambridge) and his PhD in English and comparative literature in 1978 (Columbia). His books of poetry include Yeshiva Boys (2008), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), and The Daily Mirror (2000), all from Scribner. Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other collections. He has written six nonfiction books, including A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook / Schocken), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday) and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (Simon and Schuster). He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the anthology’s general editor. With Star Black, Lehman originated and was co-director of the famed KGB Bar Monday night poetry series. He has written on a wide variety of subjects for numerous journals ranging from The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal to American Heritage, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and Art in America. He has taught in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City since the program's inception in 1996 and has served as poetry coordinator since 2003.

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the collection of poems Halflife (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the 2008 May Sarton Award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and her second book of poems, Once, will be published in 2010. She is a co-poetry editor of The Paris Review and a literary critic for the online magazine Slate. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry, and more, and she is at work on a nonfiction book about grief. A native of Brooklyn, New York, she earned her BA from Yale University and an MFA from Warren Wilson.

Paul Violi is the author of twelve books of poems, including Overnight and The Curious Builder from Hanging Loose Press and Breakers, a selection of his longer poems, from Coffee House Press. He also published a book of prose, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes. He has received the Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, The Fund for Poetry, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and two poetry fellowships from The New York State Foundation for the Arts and two from the National Endowment for the Arts.