Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks Leading with a Naked Body with Leela Chantrelle and Poems in Conversation and a Conversation with Elizabeth Alexander. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective, and in 2018, her work was featured in Courage Everywhere, celebrating women’s suffrage and the fight for political equality, at National Theatre London.
C.S. GISCOMBE’s poetry books are Prairie Style, Giscome Road, Here, etc.; his prose books are Into and Out of Dislocation, Border Towns, and Ohio Railroads (“a poem in essay form”). The poetry book Train Music (a collaboration with the book artist Judith Margolis) was published in 2021; forthcoming is Similarly (a “selected and new” poetry volume). He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English. He is a long-distance cyclist.