Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual-video artist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017); Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015); which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011); A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007); and three limited edition chapbooks. Most recently, she co-edited with Erica Hunt an anthology, Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN / Radical WRITING (Kore Press, 2018). Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper's, n+1, and elsewhere. Martin is a Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is also the recipient of a 2018 NEA Grant in Creative Writing.

Alan Dean is an independent fiction writer with a focus on magic realism, satire, fantasy and science fiction, and a fine art photographer. Alan is an RYA/MCA Offshore Yachtmaster, a B.Sc. biologist and Ph.D. anthropologist with extensive experience of wilderness travel and working with people from a wide range of backgrounds and cultures. He lives with his wife and daughter on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.