B. H. Fairchild grew up in small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. He is the author of The Arrival of the Future, Local Knowledge, and The Art of the Lathe, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the California Book Award, the PEN Center West Poetry Award, and an award from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller/Bellagio, and NEA Fellowships, and recently received the Arthur Rense Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in California.

Elise Paschen is the author of Bestiary, as well as Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares and Shenandoah, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies. She is editor of The New York Times best-selling anthology Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks, Poetry Speaks Expanded, Poetry in Motion, and Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, Paschen teaches in the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.