Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Rob Griffith is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: The Devil in the Milk (Kelsay Books, 2017); The Moon from Every Window (David Robert Books, 2011), which was nominated for the 2013 Poets' Prize; and A Matinee in Plato's Cave, winner of the 2009 Best Book of Indiana Award. His work has also appeared in magazines and journals such as Poetry, First Things, River Styx, The North American Review, PN Review, The Sewanee Theological Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Oxford American, among many others. He has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and has received numerous awards, including the ACM Literary Award for Poetry, The University of the South's Tennessee Williams Scholarship for Poetry, Colgate University's Chenango Valley Scholarship for Poetry, the Felix Christopher McKean Award for Poetry, and the Lily Peter Fellowship for Poetry. Professor Griffith received his B.A. from the University of Tennessee and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas; and in 2005, Professor Griffith was awarded the University of Evansville's Outstanding Professor Award. He is the Director of the University of Evansville Press, one of the founding co-editors of Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, and Chair of the Creative Writing Department.

Katie Darby Mullins has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net twice. She is the associate editor of metrical poetry journal Measure, and she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like The Rumpus, Hawaii Pacific Review, BOAAT Press, Harpur Palate, Prime Number, Big Lucks, Pithead Chapel, and she was a semifinalist in the Ropewalk Press Fiction Chapbook competition and in the Casey Shay Press poetry chapbook competition.

Lisa Nikolidakis is a graduate of Rutgers University (BA and MA) and Florida State University (PhD). Her essay “Family Traditions,” which first appeared in Southern Indiana Review, was selected by Jonathan Franzen for inclusion in Best American Essays 2016. Her work has also appeared in Los Angeles Review, Brevity, Gulf Coast online, Passages North, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Nimrod, The Greensboro Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her work has been runner-up or honorable mention for numerous prizes, including the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Gulf Coast Prize, the Lamar York Prize for Fiction, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Prose, the Calvino Prize, the Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize, and she has won both A Room Of Her Own’s Orlando Prize and The Briar Cliff Review’s Nonfiction Prize. In 2017, she was given the Exemplary Teacher Award by the University of Evansville.

Margaret McMullan is the author of six award-winning novels, and the recipient of a 2010 NEA Fellowship in literature and a 2010 Fulbright at the University of Pécs in Pécs, Hungary. She was the National Author Winner of the 2011 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, and she is currently the Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing. Her novels include In My Mother's House, a Pen/Faulkner nominee; Cashay, a Chicago Public Library 2009 Teen Book Selection; and When I Crossed No-Bob, a 2008 Parents' Choice Silver Honor, a 2007 School Library Journal Best Book, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, a Booklist 2009 Best Book For Young Adults, and a 2011 Mississippi Center for the Book selection at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Both When I Crossed No-Bob and How I Found the Strong won the Mississippi Arts and Letters Award for Best Fiction (in 2004 and 2008), the Indiana Best Young Adult Book (in 2005 and 2008), and they are both New York Public Library A-List Books for Teens.| How I Found the Strong was also named an American Library Association 2005 Notable Social Studies Book, and a Booklist's Top Ten First Novel for Youth. Margaret’s latest book, Sources of Light is an American Library Association 2011 Best Book for Young Adults, a Best 2011 Book of Indiana, and a Chicago Public Library Teen Selection.

Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, Southern Accents, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, StorySouth, National Geographic for Kids, and The Sun among several other journals and anthologies such as Christmas Stories from the South's Best Writers. A 2007 Eudora Welty Visiting Writer at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, Margaret has taught on the summer faculty at the Stony Brook Southampton Writers Conference in Southampton, New York, at the Eastern Kentucky University Low-Residency MFA Program, and at the University of Southern Indiana’s Summer and Winter Ropewalk Writers Retreat.