Joan Houlihan
Joan Houlihan is the author of six books of poetry, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest (Four Way Books, 2021) winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award and a Notable Indie Award; and Shadow-feast (Four Way Books, 2018), named a Must-Read by Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her other books are: The Us, also a Massachusetts Center for the Book Must-Read book and Ay, both from Tupelo Press; The Mending Worm, winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press; and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. Her poems have appeared in a wide array of leading journals, including Poetry, Plume, Boston Review, Harvard Review and Ploughshares and have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press) among others. She has taught at Columbia University, Emerson College and Smith College and served on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Houlihan founded and directs the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
Peter Covino
Peter Covino is one of the founding editors of Barrow Street Press,a not-for-profit press connected to the nationally known journal, Barrow Street. The press publishes poetry collections through its annual contest and through solicitations. As a former professional social worker–who worked in the fields of foster care, AIDS services, and youth and family services for fourteen years, and as an Italian immigrant–poet, translator, and editor, Peter Covino’s creative writing and research interests continue to be strongly influenced by the interrelationship of ethnic culture, work in translation, and psychosocial identity. Covino is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the U of Rhode Island, and author of the full-length poetry collections, The Right Place to Jump (2012); and Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2005) both from W. Michigan University Press, New Issues, along with Straight Boyfriend winner of Frank O’Hara Prize Chapbook Prize. He has also co-edited an essay collection on Italian American Literature, Bordighera CUNY (2012). His prizes include the PEN American / Osterweil Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence, two recent URI Research Council grants, and a Faculty Mentoring award; and fellowship / residencies from Richmond the American International University of London, the American Academy in Rome, and the Nida Translation Institute, among others. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Community RAI Italian Television, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Journal of Italian Translation, Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and the Yale Review. You can check out more of his work at: www.petercovino.com
Brian Komei Dempster
Brian Komei Dempster is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher. His volumes of poetry, Seize (Four Way Books, 2020) and Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013), have received several honors, including the Julie Suk Award, an NCPA Gold Award in Poetry, and a Human Relations Indie Book Silver Winner award. He has taught creative writing to diverse groups; he edited two collections based on his classes, From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), which received a Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2011). Dempster is a professor of rhetoric and language and Co-Director of the Center for Research, Artistic, and Scholarly Excellence at the University of San Francisco, where he was a recipient of the Dean’s Scholar Award and Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition to teaching poetry workshops for the university, he has led classes for Connecticut Poetry Society, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Kearny Street Workshop and Literary Arts and been a Poetry Fellow at the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. He was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
Gabriel Fried
Gabriel Fried has been poetry editor at Persea Books since 2001. Founded in 1975, Persea is a small literary publishing house based in New York City. It has remained independently owned and operated since its inception. At Persea, Fried has edited and championed books by dozens of contemporary poets, among them Cameron Awkward-Rich, Elizabeth Bradfield, Molly McCully Brown, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Patrick Rosal, Michelle Peñaloza, Carey Salerno, and Lisa Russ Spaar. He is also a poet himself, the author of three collections, including No Small Thing (Four Way Books, 2025), The Children Are Reading (Four Way Books, 2017), and Making the New Lamb Take (Sarabande Books, 2007).
Fred Marchant
Fred Marchant’s new collection of poetry, Said Not Said, is available from Graywolf Press. The Looking House (Graywolf Press, 2009), was named by Barnes and Noble Review as one of the five best books of poetry in 2009. He is also the author of Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize in poetry, and Full Moon Boat (Graywolf Press, 2000). A new and selected volume, House on Water, House in Air, was published by Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland, in 2002. He was the 2009 co-winner (with Afaa Michael Weaver) of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets whose “work is an inspiration to other poets.” Fred Marchant is also the co-translator (with Nguyen Ba Chung) of From a Corner of My Yard, by Tran Dang Khoa, and Con Dau Prison Songs by Vo Que, both published in Hanoi. He is also editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947 (Graywolf Press, 2008). His most recent work has appeared in such journals as AGNI, Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Field, Ocean State Review, Plume, and Solstice, among others. Emeritus Professor of English and Founding Director of The Suffolk University Poetry Center in Boston, he is a longtime teaching affiliate of The William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and teaches poetry workshops at various places across the country, including the Veterans Writing Group in the San Francisco Bay area, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. Fred has been a teaching faculty member in the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference ever since its beginnings in 2006.
Nathan McClain
Nathan McClain is the author of two poetry collections — Previously Owned (2022) and Scale (2017) — both from Four Way Books, a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, The Critical Flame, Zocalo Public Square, and the Plume Anthology of Poetry 10. He currently teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review.
Jennifer Militello
Jennifer Militello is the author of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016), called “positively bewitching” by Publishers Weekly and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the top books of 2013 by Best American Poetry and runner-up for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have been published widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Tin House, and anthologized in Best New Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion, and The Manifesto Project. She has been awarded the Barbara Bradley Award, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, the Betty Gabehart Prize, the Yeats Poetry Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award, as well as grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.
Rusty Morrison
Rusty Morrison is an American poet and publisher. Her poetry book After Urgency won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize (2012). The Book of the Given is available from Noemi Press. the true keeps calm biding its story won Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America. Whethering won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, and DiCastagnola Memorial Awards from The Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in periodicals including A Public Space, American Poetry Review, Bomb, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, Lana Turner, New American Writing, Pleiades, poets.org, Poem-A-Day, Verse, and VOLT. Her essays and/or long reviews have been, or will be published in Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Evening Will Come, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Poetry Flash, Verse, and in the anthologies One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe (Sarabande 2010), Beauty is a Verb (Cinco Punto 2011). In 2001, Morrison and her husband, Ken Keegan, founded Omnidawn Publishing in Richmond, California, and continue to work as co-publishers.
Stephen Motika
Stephen Motika, poet and publisher, is the author of Western Practice, published by Alice James Books in 2012. He is also the author of two chapbooks, Arrival and At Mono (2007) and In the Madrones (2011), and editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009). His articles and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, At Length, BOMB, The Brooklyn Review, Eleven Eleven, Maggy, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Poets.org, Vanitas
Hilda Raz
Hilda Raz is editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, University of New Mexico Press, and the poetry editor for BOSQUE (the magazine). She is the author of seven books of poetry published by Wesleyan University Press and other presses, the editor of five books published by Persea Press, and others, and a memoir, with Aaron Raz, What Becomes You, published in the American Lives Series, ed. Tobias Wolff, University of Nebraska Press, finalist in two categories for the Lambda Book Award. Her fourteenth book is a collection of poetry, List & Story, just published by Steven J. Austin Press. She is editor emerita of the venerable literary quarterly Prairie Schooner and founding director of the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes, and their e-Book Prizes, two annual publication and cash awards in both short fiction and poetry, now in their eleventh year of publication. She is also a member of the Board of Directors for these prizes and also Arbor Farms Press in Corrales, NM. Hilda Raz is a member of the Board of Directors, Goucher College MFA in Creative Nonfiction; a past president of AWP; and is Luschei Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, emerita, at the University of Nebraska where she taught in the graduate program in Creative Writing, poetry. She has taught at many universities, writers’ conferences and MFA programs including Stanford, Georgia, Harvard, Bread Loaf, Rainier Writing Workshop, and Taos. For a more complete bio, see HildaRaz.com
Martha Rhodes
Martha Rhodes is the publisher and executive editor of Four Way Books, a literary press in New York City where she edits and publishes award-winning poets including Gregory Pardlo (Pulitzer Prize), Rigoberto Gonzalez (Lenore Marshall Award and Lambda Award) and Yona Harvey (Kate Tufts Discovery Award). She is author of five poetry collections: The Thin Wall (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), The Beds (Autumn House Press), Mother Quiet (Zoo Press, 2004), Perfect Disappearance (winner of The Green Rose Prize, New Issues, 2000), and At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1995). She has published widely in magazines and journals including Agni, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly, and her work has appeared in such anthologies as Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, The New American Poets, Last Call, and many others. Martha has taught at Emerson College, New School University, UC at Irvine, Sarah Lawrence, and currently teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
Carey Salerno
Carey Salerno is the executive director and executive editor of Alice James Books. She is the author of Shelter (2009) and Tributary (2021), and her poems, essays, and articles about her work as a publisher can be found in places like American Poetry Review, NPR, The New York Times, among others. She has poems forthcoming in North American Review and Alaska Quarterly Review, and since 2010 she’s served as a lecturer in poetry and publishing arts for the University of Maine at Farmington. In a starred review of Tributary, Publishers Weekly deemed Salerno’s work “bold, memorable, and capacious.” Salerno is co-editor of Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. She is a frequent guest at residencies, and MFA and nontraditional writing programs. In 2021, she received the Golden Colophon Award for Independent Paradigm Publishing from CLMP, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, for the leadership and contributions of Alice James Books. Her current editorial project is Light Me Down: The Collected Poems of Jean Valentine, forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2024. Visit careysalerno.com for more.
Jeff Shotts
Jeff Shotts is currently Executive Editor at Graywolf Press, where he has worked for more than twenty years acquiring and editing works of poetry, creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and translation. Authors whose works he has acquired have received the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, and books he has acquired and edited have received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. Shotts received the 2017 Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Ellen Doré Watson
Poet and translator Ellen Doré Watson is Director Emerita of The Poetry Center at Smith College. She served for three decades as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review, and taught in the Drew University Low-Residency MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation for many years. Her fifth full-length collection, pray me stay eager, is available from Alice James Books. Earlier books include Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press, 2010), This Sharpening (also from Tupelo), and two from Alice James, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Orion, and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Watson’s best-known works of translation are The Alphabet in the Park and Ex-Voto, both by Brazilian Adélia Prado. Currently, she leads four Zoom workshops and takes on private students for developmental editing of poetry and translations manuscripts.