Bobbie Louise Hawkins (1930-2018) wrote more than twenty books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and performance monologues. She performed her work at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, Bottom Line and Folk City in New York City; at The Great American Music Hall and Intersection in San Francisco, as well as reading and performing in Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Holland, and more. In England she worked with Apples and Snakes, read at the Canterbury Festival and the Poetry Society. She was commissioned to write a one-hour play for Public Radio’s “The Listening Ear,” and she has a record, with Rosalie Sorrels and Terry Garthwaite, Live At the Great American Music Hall, available from Flying Fish. She was invited by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg to begin a prose concentration in the writing program at Naropa University where she taught for twenty years. She was also a visual artist known specifically for her collage work. Growing up in West Texas, Hawkins was raised on the family tales her grandmother told; having spent her childhood reading, Hawkins believed she would someday live in the world she only read about in books. Her life and work intersected with both that of the Beat Generation and the Black Mountain poets.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of two hybrid memoir/family histories (The Book of Jon, City Lights; You Animal Machine, Coffee House) and eight books of poetry, most recently What I Knew (Nightboat, 2019). Sikelianos is the recipient of many awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and the National Poetry Series. She was Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ student in the late 80s and early 90s, and her colleague at Naropa beginning in the early 2000s. She currently teaches at Brown University.

Laird Hunt is the author of seven novels, with an eighth, Zorrie, forthcoming from Bloomsbury USA in early 2021. He is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and was a finalist for both the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger. His reviews and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Irish Times and The Los Angeles Times, and his fiction has appeared in many literary journals here and abroad. A former United Nations press officer, he lives in Providence where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

Barbara Henning is the author of four novels and seven collections of poetry, including a recent novel, Just Like That; a book of poems, A Day Like Today; and a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography. Current projects include a hybrid documentary of her mother’s life, Look At Me—I Lived; a collection of poems, Digigrams; and experiments for teaching poetry and fiction, Prompt Book (forthcoming). She is the editor of Looking Up Harryette Mullen and The Collected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Born in Detroit, she presently lives in Brooklyn and teaches for Long Island University and writers.com.