About the Poets:

Karl Michael Iglesias is a Puerto Rican actor, director and writer from Milwaukee, WI, who now resides in Brooklyn, NY. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he is also the former creative director of the First Wave program under the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives. His poetry can be read in the Florida Review, RHINO, the Brooklyn Review, the Madison Review and the Hong Kong Review, to name a few. Karl is the author of the poetry chapbooks CATCH A GLOW and The Bounce—both available from Finishing Line Press.

Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon, November 2024). Her poems have appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, the Nation, the New Republic, Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Parks Service, the Academy of American Poets and Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s the current poet laureate for the State of Kansas.

Wendy Xu is a poet and writer, most recently the author of The Past (Wesleyan 2021) and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, Conjunctions, the New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares and widely elsewhere. She has a new book, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire, forthcoming in October 2025 by the Poets on Poetry series at University of Michigan Press. Xu is assistant professor of writing at The New School in NYC.