Dorothy Derifield is the director of the long-running literary reading series, Chapter and Verse in Jamaica Plain. She is also a member of the committee that directs the Rozzie Reads Poetry Reading Series in Roslindale. She is the author of the book Zero Plus Time (Cherry Grove Collections, 2020) and a chapbook, The River and the Lakes. Her work has won an Editor’s Award from Plainsongs and has appeared in the Radcliffe Quarterly among other journals. She is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets and lives in Roslindale.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Oxford American, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she is working on a poetry and nonfiction collection while raising her son in Los Angeles. Her essay collection, CHUECA, is forthcoming from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2023. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.

Monica McAlpine published her first book of poems, Winter Bride (Main Street Rag Press, 2021) at age eighty. Other poems of hers have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Leon, Poetry Quarterly, The Aurorean, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Professor Emerita at University of Massachusetts Boston, where she taught for thirty-six years and directed the Honors Program, McAlpine is the author of two books and several articles on medieval literature. She has exhibited her paintings with local art associations. She and her husband live in Brookline; they have two grandchildren.

Cammy Thomas’ first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. Her third collection, Tremors, has just come out. All are published by Four Way Books. Far Past War, a choral work by composer Augusta Read Thomas based on two of her poems, will premiere at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in 2022. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.