Connie Mae Oliver is a graduate of CUNY Brooklyn's Poetry MFA, lives in Düsseldorf and is currently working on a project titled, "Prose Poems For Hard Times."

Lee Upton’s most recent book is Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition, Boredom, Purity, & Secrecy, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in July 2012. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Best American Poetry 2011, 32 Poems, and The Literary Review. Her short stories appear widely. She is the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College.

Poemic (1913 Press, 2011), and author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005), Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbooks Shake Her (Dusie Kollektiv, 2009; republished by Ugly Duckling Presse later this year) and Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). She is co-editor of three anthologies: with Rachel Zucker, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (Iowa, 2010) and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (Iowa, 2008); and with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2010). Twice featured in Best American Poetry and the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, she is the founder-moderator of the poet-moms listserv. In 2011 she left a tenured position in poetry at Columbia College Chicago to move with her family to a small town in rural Maine in pursuit of a different pace of life.

Stephanie E. Schlaifer is originally from Atlanta, GA, and works as an artist and freelance editor in St. Louis, Missouri. She has a BA/BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has appeared numerous journals, including Verse, Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Cimarron Review, and Fence. She is currently working on a series of poems about historic weather events and is incredibly handy with a pitchfork.