Felicity Plunkett is an award-winning poet and critic living on Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Her books are  A Kinder Sea  (University of Queensland Press),  Vanishing Point  (UQP) and  Seastrands  (Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects series). She edited the collection  Thirty Australian Poets  (UQP). Felicity has a PhD from the University of Sydney, was first an academic, then Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press for a decade. She is a widely-published reviewer and essayist. She is Poetry Editor with  Australian Book Review  and teaches poetry masterclasses with Varuna, the National Writers’ House. Photo credit: Simona Janek. 

Sheryda Warrener is the author of the poetry collections  Hard Feelings,  Floating Is Everything, and most recently,  Test Piece, which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. She is a lecturer in the School of Creative Writing at UBC, and is curator of  The Provocation Collection, a series of material prompts for writers designed in collaboration with artists.  You can check out Test Piece here: Coach House Books and  find her intermittently on the internet  here. 

Iona Lee  is a writer from Edinburgh, whose work encompasses poetry, visual art, music and spoken-word. Her critically-acclaimed debut poetry collection, Anamnesis (Polygon, 2023) was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Award and won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 2024, she published 'What I Love About A Cloud Is Its Unpredictability', a collection of concrete poetry created through interactions with the geolocation software what3words. Iona has an MFA in Art & Humanities, and her work is concerned with themes of magic, media, truth and tale-telling, art and artifice, memory and other hauntings. 

Website: www.ionalee.com

Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana is a multi-award winning South African poet, essayist and novelist. He has just been appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador for the Kendeka Prize in African Literature which is based in Kenya. Amongst many accolades, during 2024 he won the most prestigious South African Literary Award (SALA) in the poetry category. He is widely published and anthologised; both in local and international journals. He has most recently published four books: the multi award winning Dark Lines Of History; an isiXhosa poetry collection, Iziyaca; Ntombentle : Selected Poems and The Kaleidoscope Of Life : Essays On Identity And Indigenous Knowledge Systems.  

Boris Dralyuk is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and translator of volumes by Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Leo Tolstoy, and other authors. His poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, The Spectator, Best American Poetry 2023, and elsewhere. Formerly editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow, editor-in-chief of Nimrod, and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa.

Sachiko Murakami is the author of  Render  (2020),  Get Me Out of Here  (2015),  Rebuild  (2011), and  The Invisibility Exhibit  (2008). As a literary worker, she has edited poetry, taught creative writing, worked for trade organizations, hosted reading series, sat on juries, and judged prizes. She lives in Toronto.  

Website: sachikomurakami.com 

Kayla Czaga is the author of the poetry collections Midway (House of Anansi, 2024), which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the DC Reid Poetry Prize; Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019), also a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; and For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), which won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was nominated for a Governor General’s literary award. Her poems have been selected for inclusion eight times in The Best Canadian Poetry in English series.  

From the ahupuaʻa of Aʻapueo in Kula, Maui, Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ʻŌiwi, she/her/ʻo ia) is the author of two poetry collections, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Paʻakai (Kuleana ʻŌiwi Press, 2008) and ʻĀina Hānau, Birth Land (University of Arizona Press, 2023). Her critical monograph Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (University of Arizona Press, 2016) is the first extensive study of contemporary Hawaiian literature and was the winner of the 2017 Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. She is an Associate Professor of American Studies (specializing in Indigenous studies) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Hawaiʻi Poet Laureate for 2023-2025. Her creative work has been recently featured in the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2025 and as part of the City and County of Honolulu’s Wahi Pana Public Art Initiative. She lives with her keiki in Mānoa in the ahupuaʻa of Waikīkī on Oʻahu.  

Robin S Ngangom is a bilingual  poet and translator who writes in English and Manipuri. His  collection, Words and the Silence  (1988), introduced a distinctive voice from India's Northeast, and My Invented Land  (2023) deepens his exploration of memory, belonging, and loss. Invited to the UK Year of Literature and Writing in 1995, his poems appeared in The New Statesman, Verse, Kunapipi, Planet: the Welsh Internationalist, The Literary Review, and the Penguin Book of Indian Poets. 

Jaswinder Bolina’s most recent book  English as a Second Language and Other Poems  (2023) was awarded the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. He is author of three previous poetry collections,  The 44th of July  (2019),  Phantom Camera  (2013), and  Carrier Wave  (2007), and of the  essay collection  Of Color  (2020).  

Website: www.jaswinderbolina.com  

Derek Webster grew up in China, the UK, and Canada. He founded award-winning arts magazine  Maisonneuve  and received an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. His first book of poems  Mockingbird (2016) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best poetry debut in Canada and his second collection National Animal won the 2024 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Recent and forthcoming work appears in The Brooklyn Review  and  Interim  (USA),  Bad Lilies  and  Stand (UK),  The Honest Ulsterman  (Ireland) and, in Canada, The Fiddlehead,  Grain and The Walrus. He lives in Montreal and Toronto. 

Sinéad Morrissey  was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She has published six collections with Carcanet as well as a selected poems,  Found Architecture (2020). Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times  Award (2009, 2013) and the T S Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2013. In 2016 she received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance (2017) was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In 2020 Sinéad Morrissey was named the European Poet of Freedom by the City of Gdańsk, Poland and in 2024 she was the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award (Japan). She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.