Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. He is the author of 16 books of poetry, including, most recently, Divine Nothingness (Norton, 2014) and In Beauty Bright (Norton, 2012), as well as This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award and a kind-of memoir of a year in 85 sections titled Stealing History, was published by Trinity University Press in the spring of 2012. Stern was awarded the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets, was the 2010 recipient of the Medal of Honor in Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was inducted into the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the 2012 recipient of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. He was the 2014 winner of the Frost Medal. Stern has two books coming out in 2017, a poetry collection from W. W. Norton called Galaxy Love and a book of non-fiction titled Deathwatch, to be released by Trinity University Press.

Liz Moore is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction.
Her first novel, The Words of Every Song (Broadway Books, 2007), centers on a fictional record company in New York City just after the turn of the millennium. It draws partly on Liz’s own experiences as a musician. It was selected for Borders’ Original Voices program and was given a starred review by Kirkus.Roddy Doyle wrote of it, “This is a remarkable novel, elegant, wise, and beautifully constructed. I loved the book.”

After the publication of her debut novel, Liz obtained her MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. In 2009, she was awarded the University of Pennsylvania’s ArtsEdge residency and moved to Philadelphia, where she still lives.