Pascale Armand starred on Broadway in Eclipsed, for which she received a Tony nomination, and The Trip to Bountiful with the late Ms. Cicely Tyson. Additional stage credits include Love's Labor's Lost, Hamlet, A Raisin in the Sun, The Piano Lesson, Jitney, Gem of the Ocean, Ruined, The Convert, for which she received the 2012 Los Angeles Ovation Award for Best Leading Actress, Belleville, An Octoroon, and Relevance. Her screen credits include Chicago Med, Prodigal Son, The Blacklist, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Armand is an alumna of NYU's Graduate Acting Program, core member of Quick Silver Theater, and creator of her one-woman show, $#!thole Country Clapback.

Madeline Cohen is the Director of Symphony Space’s adult literacy program, All Write! She held the position of Education Director at Symphony Space from 1989 - 2022, and has been working in arts education for 43 years as a teaching artist, staff development leader, administrator, and consultant at Lincoln Center Institute, United Federation of Teachers, and Teachers College, among others. In addition, she is a costume designer.

Philip Estrera is a NYC-based actor whose theater credits include Discus with Hunger & Thirst Theatre, Orphan of Zhao at La Jolla Playhouse, and Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress at the American Conservatory Theater. He appeared in the Sesame Street Thanksgiving special as Anton the bus driver, which introduced the first Asian American puppet to the series. He can be seen in episodes of Blue Bloods and New Amsterdam. He recently appeared in and helped develop the original new musical Monstress by Emily Kitchens, which featured all original bluegrass music and showcased him acting and fiddling. Estrera is a graduate of the American Conservatory Theater’s MFA program.

Dawn Akemi Saito is an actor, writer, director, and teacher whose credits include Insects in Heat, Suns Are Suns, Blood Cherries, HA, Knock on the Sky, Suicide Forest, Hiroshima Maiden, Arden/Ardennes, My House Is Collapsing Toward One Side, and Deshima. Her multi-disciplinary works have been performed at the Walker Art Center, Orpheum Theatre in Austria, the Whitney Museum, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Theater Workshop, LaMaMa, New World Theater, the Public Theater, and Aaron Davis Hall. Saito is an Associate Clinical Professor at Fordham University/Lincoln Center, is on the movement faculty at Juilliard, and serves as co-director of the Summer Theatre Devising Intensive at Bard College in Berlin, Germany.

Very little is known about the poet Diana Bickston other than "Collect Calls," and several other poems featured in The Light from Another Country: Poetry from American Prisons, ed. Joseph Bruchac, published in 1984.

Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent. After university she worked for fifteen years as a primary-school teacher in London. Her first collection of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986, followed by other collections including If I Don’t Know, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award, Family Values, and most recently, Anecdotal Evidence. She is also the author of the prose collection Life, Love and the Archers, and two books for children. Cope has received a Cholmondeley Award and a Michael Braude Award for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Nikki Giovanni, poet, activist, mother, and professor, is a seven-time NAACP Image Award winner and the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, among many other honors. The author of more than two dozen books and a Grammy nominee for The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, she is the University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Katha Pollitt, author of Virginity or Death!, is a poet, essayist, and columnist for The Nation. She has won many prizes and awards for her work, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for her first collection of poems, Antarctic Traveller, and two National Magazine Awards for essays and criticism. Additional works include Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories and The Mind-Body Problem: Poems.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of non-fiction The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea is the best-selling author of the novels The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Into the Beautiful North, Queen of America, and most recently, The House of Broken Angels, as well as the story collection The Water Museum, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. He has won the Lannan Literary Award, an Edgar Award, and a 2017 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among many other honors.

Luisa Valenzuela was born and now lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has lived in Paris, Barcelona, and Manhattan, where she was a writer in residence at Columbia University and later at NYU’s Writing Division. Many of her books have been translated into English: the short story collections Open Door, The Censors, Strange Things Happen Here, Other Weapons, and Symmetries, and the novels Clara, He Who Searches, The Lizard’s Tail, Black Novel (with Argentines), and Bedside Manner.