Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans to love the dark. They are the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the  Levis Reading Prize. Other honors include fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. Laurentiis is the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Terrance Hayes is the author of  seven books, most recently American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight. Among his many honors are a MacArthur Foundation (“genius”) Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Award. Co-founder of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh, Hayes is currently Artist-in-Residence at New York University.