Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). Abel’s latest project NISHGA (forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in 2020) is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence and the often invisible intergenerational impact of residential schools. Abel recently completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, Paris Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017). Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University and in the low residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent UK. After reading history at Oxford, she worked as a primary school teacher in London until the publication of her first book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, in 1986. Since then she has been freelance. Her fifth collection of poems, Anecdotal Evidence, was published in 2018. She has also written for children and edited several anthologies. She was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2010.