Ralph Angel is the author of four books of poetry: Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 (2007 PEN USA Poetry Award); Twice Removed; Neither World (1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets); and Anxious Latitudes; as well as a translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song. His poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award, the Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association. Mr. Angel is Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Carol Muske-Dukes is author of seven books of poetry, including Sparrow; and An Octave Above Thunder, New & Selected Poems. Her three novels are Life After Death, Saving St. Germ, and Dear Digby Carol's collection of essays entitled Married to the Icepick Killer, A Poet in Hollywood was published in August of 2002. Her collection of reviews and critical essays, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self was published in the "Poets on Poetry" series of the University of Michigan Press, 1997. She is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Book Review. Her work appears everywhere from the New Yorker to L.A. Magazine and she is anthologized widely. She is professor of English and Creative Writing and founding Director of the new PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing at USC. She has received many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill, the Witter Bynner award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America and several Pushcart Prizes. On November 13, 2008, Governor Schwarzenegger appointed Carol as California's poet laureate.

Cecilia Woloch attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, earning degrees in English and Theater Arts, before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University L.A. in 1999. A celebrated teacher, Ms. Woloch has conducted poetry workshops for thousands of children throughout the United States and around the world, as well as workshops for professional writers, educators, senior citizens, prison inmates, and homeless women and their children. She has served on the faculties of a number of graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs, and since 2006 has been a lecturer in the creative writing program at USC. Woloch is the author of Carpathia, Sacrifice, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, Late, for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004; and a chapbook, Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Competition in 2006. Her poems have been anthologized in When She Named Fire: Contemporary American Women Poets; Best American Erotic Poetry: 1800 to the Present; Billy Collins' 180 More (Extraordinary Poems for Every Day), Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times, among many others.