Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of Pennsylvania Furnace, editor's choice selection for the Unicorn Press first book series, as well as the chapbooks Orchard Light and Jumping the Pit. She has served as artist in residence at Gettysburg National Military Park. She lives in Tucson and works at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Christopher Cokinos is the author of three books of literary nonfiction: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds; The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars; and Bodies, of the Holocene. In 2016, the University of Arizona Press published his co-edited anthology, The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide, which won a Southwest Book of the Year award. Cokinos's poetry collection, The Underneath, was awarded the New American Press Poetry Prize.