Katherine Soniat's fourth collection, Alluvial, has been published by Bucknell University Press (2001) and is a finalist for The Library of Virginia Center for the Book Award. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize given by the University of Iowa Press, and a Virginia Prize for Poetry. She has been a recipient of the Camden Poetry Prize, Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowships, the William Faulkner Prize, an Ann Stanford Prize, and a Jane Kenyon Prize for Poetry. Her other collections include Cracking Eggs, Notes of Departure and a chapbook, Winter Toys. Poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Nation, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Witness, River Styx, The Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. An associate professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, she lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Lucinda Roy has received the Felix Christopher McKean Award for poetry from the University of Arkansas of Arkansas; the Madeline Sadin Award for Poetry from New York Quarterly/Pulpsmith; and the Baxter Hathaway Poetry Prize from Epoch, Cornell University . She grew up in London, the daughter of a British mother and a Jamaican father. She received her undergraduate education at King's College, London, and her MFA at the University of Arkansas of Arkansas. She is currently a professor of English and Alumni Distinguished Professor, as well Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.