Mary Hickman was born in Nampa, Idaho, in 1979, and grew up in China and Taiwan. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Hickman is the author of Rayfish (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), which won the James Laughlin award from the Academy of American Poets, and This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015). A visiting professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, she also teaches in the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s Between the Lines exchange program.

Robert Fernandez is the author of the poetry collections We Are Pharaoh (Canarium, 2011), Pink Reef (Canarium, 2013), and Scarecrow (Wesleyan, 2016). He holds an MFA in poetry from Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Conjunctions, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He was selected by Robyn Schiff as a New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America, and received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is cotranslator of Azure: Poems and Selections from the "Livre" (Wesleyan, 2015).