PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is the New York State Poet Laureate, a playwright, educator, and cultural activist. Winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, Jones is author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and three full-length collections and five chapbooks. Her most recent book The Beloved Community was released in 2023.She co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women. In addition to her published poems, essays, memoir, and interviews, she has curated programs at The Poetry Project of St. Marks Church. Jones is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at Barnard College.

BRENT HAYES EDWARDS is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center. In 2022-23 he is one of the three inaugural Ford Foundation Scholars-in-Residence at The Museum of Modern Art. In 2015 Edwards was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His award-winning books include Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017), The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003)and most recently, winner of the Jazz Journalists Association 2024 Award for Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music, by Henry Threadgill with Brent Hayes Edwards.