Hedy Habra was born in Egypt and is of Lebanese origin. She is fluent in several languages and taught Spanish at Western Michigan University. He new collection of poems is The Taste of the Earth (July 2019, Press 53). Her previous collections include Under Brushstrokes, finalist for the 2015 USA Best Book Award and the International Book Award for Poetry, and Tea in Heliopolis, winner of the 2014 USA Best Book Award and finalist for the International Book Award for Poetry.

Stephanie Carpenter is the author of Missing Persons, winner of the 2017 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. She was born and raised in Traverse City, Michigan. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. Her current project, a pair of novellas about professional female artists in nineteenth-century New England, has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. She currently teaches creative writing and literature at Michigan Tech University, in the northernmost reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Stacy R. Nigliazzo is the author of Sky the Oar, a new collection of poems from Press 53 (Fall 2018). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including the American Journal of Nursing, Bellevue Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ilanot Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Thrush Poetry Journal. Her first collection of poems, Scissored Moon, won First Place in the 2014 American Journal of  Nursing Book of the Year Awards in Public Interest and Creative Works. She lives in Houston, Texas, and has worked as an emergency room nurse for the past twelve years.

Joseph Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. He has published six collections of poetry, including Exit, pursued by a bear, which consists of poems triggered by stage directions in Shakespeare, and This Miraculous Turning, which was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. In April 2019 he published his debut collection of short fiction, Bleachers: Fifty-Four Linked Fictions with Press 53.