Paul Vangelisti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and a noted translator from Italian. Some recent books of poems are Solitude (2015), Border Music (2016), and Just in Time (2024).

Dennis Phillips (born 1951) is a U.S. poet & novelist. He co-edited the poetry-section of the New Review of Literature, was a founding editor of Littoral Books, the first Book Review Editor of the magazine Sulfur and the L.A. Weekly's first poetry-editor, as well as a director of the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. Phillips attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Clayton Eshleman. He then attended graduate school at New York University. He is a professor in the Humanities and Science Department at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the city where he lives with his wife, artist Courtney Gregg, and their daughter.

Jessie McCarty is an Irish-American writer from Shreveport, Louisiana. Their poetry, in English and Gaeilge, uses images of the Louisiana South and Midwest as memory tools. Their poems can be read in Dublin’s Bog Bodies Press, Sarka Journal, The Minnesota Review, Charm School, The Documentarian, Don’t Submit Lit, Thick Press, and more.

Jessie’s writing has been published as research chapbooks for the following theatrical productions: The Sarcoma Cycle (11:11 Press, 2024), the Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions: A Homo-Turgy ode to Larry Mitchell (Jack Bowes, 2024), and Perforated Play (Dir. Miles Sennett, 2022). They have taught writing at Index Space, The Center for Fiction, and more. Previous collections include The Bovine Huff (Track and Field Studios, 2021) and the self-published artist book, Our Fairy Diary (2023). Their poem, “Loving you is ordinary heaven,” was featured in Only Poems Daily under Best New Poems in August 2025. They were nominated as Best New Poetry Book by a Chicagoan and Best New Poet for the Chicago Reader’s Best of Arts and Culture in 2022, for their work, The Bovine Huff.

Jessie McCarty has a BFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They hold certifications in systems migration and rare book cataloging (DCRMB).

S.E. Pessin is adjunct faculty at California State University, Northridge, where he is the faculty advisor for Northridge Review, the campus’s oldest literary magazine, and director of the Book Arts Lab in the Department of English; a Ph.D. student in Information Studies at UCLA and the Associate Director of Publishing and Pedagogy for the UCLA Library, Ethics, and Justice Lab; and a humanities professor at Colburn School. Pessin’s research interests include pedagogy, digital humanities, book history, book arts, publishing and distribution, and the relationship between ‘the public’ and print culture. His chapbook of TED Talk eavesdropping poems, Thank You for Listening, was published by Mindmade Books in 2017; his fairy tale tryptic, Three Stories, was published by Magra Books in 2021.

His work is always fabulous and strange and queer.