Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of five award-winning poetry collections: Sleeping Preacher, Eve’s Striptease, Poetry in America, and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer and Penn State professor Steven Rubin. Her new book of poems is titled As Is. She teaches poetry and directs the creative writing program at Penn State.

C. S. Giscombe teaches at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English. His prose and poetry books include Negro Mountain, Prairie Style, Ohio Railroads (“a long poem in the form of an essay”), Similarly (selected poetry and new work), and Border Towns. In progress is Railroad Sense. He is a long-distance cyclist.