Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Louisiana’s Poet Laureate from 2009-2011. He is the author of The Blue Boat (2004), Burnt Water Suite (1999), and Plainsongs (1994). His most recent publication is Call and Response: Conversations in Verse (2010), a collaborative collection coauthored with Jack Bedell.

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of the forthcoming collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art (2002). She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance. She teaches at Cooper Union and Bard College.

Yusef Komunyakaa is Professor of the Council of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Taboo: Wishbone Trilogy Part One (2004); Scandalize My Name (2002); Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); and Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His 1999 collection, Thieves of Paradise, was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award and won The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, Poetry Magazine’s Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Morton  Zabel Award, and the Southern Literary Association’s Hanes Poetry Prize. His 1993 collection, Neon Vernacular, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, the William Faulkner Prize, and selected as a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. His other collections include Magic City (1992); Dien Cai Dau (1988); I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986); and Copacetic (1984). He has also published a work of nonfiction entitled Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries (2000). He is the recipient of NEA Fellowships in 1987 and 1981 and the 2001 Ruth Lily Prize for Poetry.

Mona Lisa Saloy  Author and Folklorist, is currently Associate Professor of
English, Director, the Samuel DuBois Cook/Daniel C. Thompson Honors Program;
founding Director of the Creative Writing Program, a successful 15-year-old program, at

Dillard University. A native of New Orleans, she is the author of the poetry collections Red Beans and Ricely Yours (2005) and Between Laughter and Tears (1995).  Mona Lisa’s collection of verse, Red Beans and Ricely Yours: Poems, won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize in 2006 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in poetry for 2005, published by Truman State University Press; also, this collection was finalist for the Morgan Prize from Story-Line Press. In October of 2006, The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia commissioned Mona Lisa Saloy to compose and perform a poem entitled “We” celebrating 2006 Liberty Medal Recipients: President William J. Clinton and President George H.W. Bush.