Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński was born on January 22, 1921 in Warsaw Poland. He was a Polish poet, one of the most known of the Generation of Columbuses. He died on August 2 1944. He was a soldier in Polish Home Army and he fought the Nazis. He participated in the Warsaw Uprising and was killed in the first few days of the battle. His wife Barbara died within days of his death. From fall of 1942 until 1944 he had studied Polish literature in the secret Warsaw University. His poem Erotyk, in English Erotic, which was written on February 2, 1942. Amidst brutal German occupation. Baczyński already was part of the Polish resistance. It was their love surviving the extreme conditions existing in Poland at that time.

Colin Bailes holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the 2020–2021 Levis Reading Prize Fellow and was awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. A 2022 National Poetry Series finalist, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, The Cortland Review, Missouri Review, Narrative, Raleigh Review, Subtropics, and wildness, among other journals. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, and teaches writing at Santa Fe College and Virginia Commonwealth University.

James Davis is the author of Club Q (The Waywiser Press, 2020), which won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, Best New Poets, 32 Poems, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and many other publications. He lives in Denton, Texas, where he is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at UNT.

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between Cairo and NYC. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, MQR, Four Way Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry London, Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2020, among others. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

Mario Giannone holds an MFA from Cornell University. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has previously appeared in Third Coast, Indiana Review, and Blue Mesa Review.

Joseph Housley’s poems have appeared in The New York Quarterly, Fulcrum, The Shore, and Sixth Finch, as well as other journals and anthologies. He was selected for a residency at Hewnoaks and received an MFA in poetry from The New School. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a Pushcart-nominated poet, organizer, and educator. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered reading series partnered with Asian American Writers’ Workshop that raises funds for transnational relief efforts and mutual aid organizations, and currently serves as assistant poetry editor for Sundog Lit. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, his work has appeared or will soon in the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.

Kevin McLellan is the author of: the forthcoming full-length poetry collection, In Other Words You/ (2022 Hilary Tham Capital Collection winner judged by Timothy Liu); the book object Hemispheres (which resides in the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona and other special collections); the full-length poetry collection Ornitheology (2019 Massachusetts Book Awards recipient); the book object [box] (which resides in the Blue Star Collection at Harvard University and other special collections); the full-length poetry collection Tributary; and the chapbook, Round Trip.

Kevin makes videos under the name, Duck Hunting with the Grammarian, and his video Dick won Best Short Form Short at the LGBTQ+ Los Angeles Film Festival and it also showed in the Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival, the Tag! Queer Film Festival, the Berlin Short Film Festival, and the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Kevin received a CAMIT grant for Wojnarowicz in Cambridge, a series of photographic portraits, which will exhibit at the Rotch Library Gallery from September 14, 2022 until October 26, 2022. https://kevmclellan.com/

Aya Nabih is a translator and writer born in Cairo. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Cairo University and MA in Audiovisual Translation from Hamad bin Khalifa University. She translated Lydia Davis’s collected short stories “Varieties of Disturbance” into Arabic, and her poetry collection “Exercises to Develop Insomnia Skills” has been published by Al-Kotob Khan. She was an artist-in-residence in Marrakech, Casablanca and New York, as part of a dance and poetry residency organized by Tamaas.

Jami Padgett is a queer poet from Ellijay, Georgia, and a current MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. She was a poetry finalist in the Agnes Scott Writers’ Festival in 2016 and received the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship in 2020. She currently serves as poetry editor for the Arkansas International, with work in Booth.

Christopher Patkowski was born in Poland in 1962, and emigrated to United States in 1976 with his mother and sister, his father already lived in America. He has graduated with a BA degree, he had studied for two years at University of Illinois and finished his studies at UIC. He is a poet, fiction writer and translator. The project of translating 34 poems of Baczyński has given him understanding of his work, and widened his prospective of life in occupied Poland during WWII. He has written a novel, a novella and, number of short stories and poems. Two of his poems written in Polish were published in the main Polish newspaper The Daily Polish Zgoda in Chicago. Several poems written in English were published in Musing Place, and one poem recently has published in Wingless Dreamer. He continues to study American literature and keep on improving his writing skills.

Noah B. Salamon is the English Department Chair at Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth, California. He received his MA in English from Loyola Marymount University. His chapbook, A Series of Moments, was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press, and his poetry has appeared in such journals as Wild Roof Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, New Plains Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Stillwater Review, New Limestone Review, and HCE Review. His essay “The Transformative Effect of Color in the Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer” was published on the World Literature Today blog in 2014. https://noahbsalamon.wordpress.com

Rikki Santer‘s poems have appeared in various publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Heavy Feather Review, Slab, Slipstream, [PANK], Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Hotel Amerika and The Main Street Rag. Her work has received many honors including six Pushcart and three Ohioana and Ohio Poet book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her eleventh poetry collection, Stopover, which is in conversation with the original Twilight Zone series was recently published by Luchador Press.

T. Dallas Saylor (he/they) is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His work meditates on the body, especially gender and sexuality, against physical, spiritual, and digital landscapes. He currently lives in Denver, CO. He is on Twitter: @dallas_saylor.

Nina Schuyler‘s short stories have been published by Zyzzyva, Fugue, Santa Clara Review, Sand Hills Literary Review, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. Her stories have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize. Her next novel, Afterword, will be published by Clash Books in May 2023. Her short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature and will be published in 2024. Her new craft book, Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal was published in November 2022. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies.

Sally Van Doren‘s art appears on the cover of The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (UPenn Press 2022), on the cover of Promise, her 2017 book of poems from LSU Press and in the literary magazines december and The 2River View. Represented by Furnace, a gallery in Falls Village, CT, she has had solo exhibitions at The Local and the Cornwall Library in CT and the Longview Art Gallery in St. Louis.

Her art appears on the cover of The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (UPenn Press 2022), on the cover of Promise, her 2017 book of poems from LSU Press and in the literary magazines december and The 2River View. Represented by Furnace, a gallery in Falls Village, CT, she has had solo exhibitions at The Local and the Cornwall Library in CT and the Longview Art Gallery in St. Louis.

Widely published in national and international poetry journals such as American Poet, Crazyhorse, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, the New Republic, and Southwest Review, she is also the author of the poetry collections Sibilance, Possessive and Sex at Noon Taxes, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her ongoing written and visual text, “The Sense Series,” was part of a multi-media performance at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has taught poetry at the 92^nd Street Y in New York, Washington University and the St. Louis Public Schools. Born and raised in St. Louis, she works from her studio in West Cornwall CT.