Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of eleven full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are In A Few Minutes Before Later (2022), Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hillman has also received the William Carlos Williams Prize from Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems for Shambhala Press, co-edited two books by Richard O. Moore, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). She has worked as a co-translator of three books: Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi, Instances by Jeongrye Choi, and At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar, all from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Three Talks: Metaphor & Metonymy, Meaning & Mystery, Magic & Morality, her first book of prose essays, was published by University of Virginia Press in autumn 2024.

Wendy Xu is 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 The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, Conjunctions, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and widely elsewhere. A new book Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire will be published Oct 2025 by the Poets on Poetry series at University of Michigan Press. Xu is assistant professor of writing at The New School in NYC.