Roxane Beth Johnson’s first book of poetry, Jubilee (Anhinga, 2006), was the winner of the 2005 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Philip Levine was the judge. Her second book, Black Crow Dress, will be hot off the press from Alice James Books. She has won an AWP Prize in Poetry and a Pushcart Prize, 2007. She has received scholarships/fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Harvard Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Image, Callaloo, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Chelsea, ZYZZYVA, The Bitter Oleander, Sentence and elsewhere.

Robin Ekiss is former Stegner Fellow, recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award, and author of The Mansion of Happiness, a finalist for the Northern California and California Book Awards, and winner of the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize. She’s also a contributing editor at ZYZZYVA, and on the executive committee of Litquake, the West Coast’s largest annual literary festival.

Xochiqueztal Candelaria holds degrees from UC Berkeley and New York University and is a faculty member at San Francisco City College. Her work has appeared in The Nation, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Seneca Review and other magazines. Ms. Candelaria received fellowships from UC Berkeley, New York University, Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Hall Farm Center for the Arts, The National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the LEF Foundation. She was the winner of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Ms. Candelaria received an individual literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and her book, Empire was published by University of Arizona Press. Ms. Candelaria’s work was featured in West Branch Wired and Poets & Writers. Her essay, “On the Teaching of Phil Levine” will be published in Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine by University of Iowa Press.