Carlene Kucharczyk’s debut poetry collection, Strange Hymn, won the 2024 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the 2025 VT Book Award for poetry. She is the recipient of a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council and holds an MFA from North Carolina State University. Her work has been published in journals such as Mid-American Review, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, and Conduit, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kucharczyk earned an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University and works at Dartmouth.

Tim Mayo is the author of two previous full-length poetry collections, The Kingdom of Possibilities (2009), and Thesaurus of Separation (2016) and two chapbooks, The Loneliness of Dogs (2008) and Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (2019). He holds an ALB, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MFA from Bennington College. A ten-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a two-time finalist for the Paumanok Award, Mayo is also the recipient of three Vermont Writers Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, as well as being a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Montaigne Medal. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he worked for fifteen years at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, as both a teacher and a mental health worker, and where he is also a founding member and organizer of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.