Named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine, Jason Koo is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: More Than Mere Light, America's Favorite Poem, and Man on Extremely Small Island, winner of the De Novo Poetry Prize and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award for the best Asian American book of 2009. He has published his poetry and prose in the American Scholar, Missouri Review, Village Voice, and Yale Review, among other places. He earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri–Columbia. An associate teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac University, Koo is the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets and creator of the Bridge (poetsbridge.org).

Shaelyn Smith grew up in northern Michigan, and received an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Alabama. Her first book, The Leftovers, was selected by Renee Gladman as the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2017 Essay Collection Competition, and was featured as a part of “The Genre of Resistance: Debut Literary Nonfiction of 2018” in the September/October 2018 issue of Poets & Writers magazine. Other work can be found in Essay Daily, storySouth, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Forklift, Ohio. She lives in Auburn, Alabama.